Unlock GDPR Compliance with Automation

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Organisations collect personal and sensitive data during the process of selling to customers, managing records of employees, holding patient information, etc. There are many good reasons for doing this but this personal and sensitive data is now subject to a stringent new law; the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Regulators will now demand that organisations document the personal data which they hold, noting its purpose and the intended policy for retention.

Achieving visibility and control.Finding such data is easy while it remains in structured databases. The same cannot be said of unstructured data. When personal data gets saved in documents and files, in what is called ‘unstructured’ form, finding this information becomes very hard. File repositories are likely to hold millions of files in thousands of different formats, any of which may contain personal information.

So how can organisations unravel this mystery and finally gain visibility into their unstructured content?

The key is to use tools and solutions which lend as much automation as possible to the situation.

• Searching for and removing old and unwanted documents and files, and finding risky associations and controlling access to files and shares can reduce the overall volume of the problem.
• Using classification techniques to simply locate files containing personal information and then placing controls over the files (who has access, where it is stored, when it should be deleted) can be highly impactful.
• Enabling retention policies on the personal data in files to ensure it is retained only for the correct period of time and then automatically deleted.

Being able to quickly locate files containing specific topics so that they can be subjected to e-discovery can have a massive and material impact on costs – such as licenses, processing and legal professionals time.

Veritas Information Governance solutions for GDPR provides systematic file data management.

• Data Insight can periodically scan unstructured file system repositories, classifying files into groups based on their content and optimising subject searches.
• Enterprise Vault can manage the retention policies set for these classes of data and the offer audited, secured deletion of that data when the retention period expires.
• eDiscovery Platform can offer a scalable, repeatable eDiscovery workflow to facilitate the rapid production of a dataset related to a given topic.

Governance of unstructured data within the vast scope of most organisations repositories can be addressed by technology. The unknown, unseen, sensitive and personal data captured in files can now be found in a fast and efficient way. To find out more or to try out the technologies from Veritas, get in touch with our Sales or Consulting team or request a GDPR Assessment here.