Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 18 | Page 34

EDITOR’S QUESTION multiple ‘secure communities’ to share the same network without other groups being able to access – or even see – their workstations and servers. In reality, GDPR was a huge task that took an uncountable amount of man hours to ensure compliance. The critical challenge was to recruit or work with the right teams and trusted partners as well as source advice from industry bodies and government to provide security capabilities, training, processes and strategy to match the new requirements. G DPR introduced strong enforcement of compliance requirements, stressing the importance of creating trust that allows the digital economy to grow inside the European Community. The objective was to bring consistency to the current data protection laws across EU member states and guide how organisations should store customer data and how they must respond in the event of a data breach. From a consumer perspective, GDPR has proven a positive experience as the average customer has seen a drastic reduction of unsolicited email, mail or phone calls. In our experience, organisations that effectively planned their compliance strategy and reviewed their personal data processing capabilities have been able to use GDPR as an opportunity to streamline the value chain and identify new ways to provide customers with value-added services. For 34 INTELLIGENTCIO these organisations, GDPR has helped get their data processing in order and improve trust in their business. However, have businesses implemented additional security controls to address the risk presented by personal data processing, such as accidental or unlawful destruction, loss, alteration and unauthorised disclosure? One year on, we have seen an increase in the number of organisations requiring ad-hoc security expertise to carry out specific data protection impact assessment to evaluate the origin, nature and severity of the risks related to the processing of personal data. Moreover, GDPR is driving a new approach to security inside the data centre network and cloud environments, called Zero Trust. Effective Zero Trust implementation for GDPR adopts software-defined security solutions that use encryption to enable Where organisations were able to choose the right partner and the proper security controls, GDPR has been a positive opportunity and has increased profitability by reducing overlapping and redundant processes. However, many organisations, especially small to medium business, are still transforming or assessing the way they handle personal data. For them, the journey has just started but the clock is ticking to close these gaps. “ GDPR IS DRIVING A NEW APPROACH TO SECURITY INSIDE THE DATA CENTRE NETWORK AND CLOUD ENVIRONMENTS. www.intelligentcio.com