A new report has found that 60% of businesses are likely to miss the GDPR compliance deadline next month.
The survey of tech decision makers, compiled by Crowd Research Partners, found that fewer than 40% are confident that their organisations will be compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
GDPR aims to protect the personal data of EU residents and affects any business that has customers located in the EU. The 2018 GDPR Compliance Report reveals that only 7% of businesses report being in compliance with the regulation, and 28% have not even begun to work towards the May 25 deadline.
Despite 80% of those surveyed saying that compliance is in their organisation’s top three priorities, only half say they are knowledgeable about the data privacy legislation or have deep expertise. With only a month to go until implementation, 25% said they have no or only very limited knowledge of the law.
The primary compliance challenges are lack of expert staff (43%), closely followed by lack of budget (40%), and a limited understanding of GDPR regulations (31%). Just over half (56%) expect their organisation’s data governance budget to increase to deal with GDPR challenges.
Approximately a third of surveyed companies report that they will need to make substantial changes to data security practices and systems to be in compliance with GDPR. The highest ranked initiative for meeting EU GDPR compliance is to make an inventory of user data and map it to protected EU GDPR categories (71%), followed by evaluating, developing, and integrating solutions that enable GDPR compliance.
In a recent interview with RegTech Analyst, ID-Pal CEO James O’Toole said many businesses don’t yet have a handle on their regulatory requirements and responsibilities associated with GDPR.
He said, “GDPR is of critical importance to our solutions, given the sensitive nature of customer information that is being dealt with. Many businesses are still struggling to get a proper handle on their requirements and responsibilities arising from this far reaching regulation. This complexity creates a massive opportunity for RegTech firms such as ourselves to simplify the compliance process so that businesses can focus more attention on their core capabilities.”
Copyright © 2018 RegTech Analyst
