Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 25 | Page 76

INDUSTRY WATCH “IF YOU ARE PROCESSING ANY EUROPEAN DATA YOU ARE ALREADY LIABLE.” GDPR compliance challenges, enabling enterprises to better understand what personal data they have, respond to customer requests and meet GDPR obligations regarding the collection, storage and handling of personal data. “Transforming enterprise data into a strategic asset that can be used to cut costs, improve customer service, reduce risk exposure and otherwise increase stakeholder value is no longer a nice competitive advantage. It’s a requirement of success for today’s digital businesses,” said N. Robert Hammer, chairman, president and CEO of Commvault. “With the introduction of the new Commvault Data Analytics Portfolio and its first application, we are delivering on our vision to push Commvault further into the analytics space while providing customers with the mission critical data capabilities needed to solve their real- world business challenges.” 76 INTELLIGENTCIO The general release of Commvault’s information governance for data privacy is expected to be available by the end of December. At Commvault GO, Intelligent CIO spoke to Dr Jacqui Taylor, founder of flyingbinary.com, about the challenges Middle East businesses face in complying to GDPR. Are Middle Eastern countries likely to think that they don’t need to comply with GDPR? I think it’s probably right. We as Europeans have a view on what I call the Foundations of the Privacy By Design principles. I think that is a European-centric view. However, with this regulation there is an opportunity – so I would say if that’s true in the Middle East (an unwillingness to comply) they are missing a trick. The reason being the service I’m here to talk about, the RegTech service, which is built from a compliance point of view, transforms organisations from a transactionable point of view taking more of a regulationary viewpoint and using that as a foundation for change. The clients that are taking those services are actually readying themselves for the Internet of Things (IoT) because the changes that we will experience as part of the compliance will actually be very similar to the changes that you will need to leverage IoT. So the European Commission has given me leave to explain what the RegTech opportunity is in Europe. When you add this to an IoT offering this can be a two times multiplier in terms of investment. If you can show three times on the dollar for IoT you can access venture funding and from a territorial point of view that’s an inward investment opportunity that the Middle East is not looking at. You can think about the threat of a fine of 4% of global turnover but actually what you are not understanding is that this is the next layer. This regulation can be used to move from DT (Digital Transformation) to IoT if you’re smart about it so they are passing up that opportunity to do that – so if the rest of the world are looking at this I would say the Middle East are a smart bunch and I wouldn’t think they would want to be www.intelligentcio.com