The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into full force in May 2018. Prior to that date, what I consistently heard from most of the compliance community was general fear and doubt about massive fines, with the solution being to re-purpose existing compliance templates and web-based dashboards. However, many organizations have learned the hard way that “paper programs” alone fall far short of the requirements under the GDPR. This is because the GDPR requires that an organization have absolute knowledge of where all EU personal data is stored across the enterprise, and be able to search for, identify and remove it when required.
Frequent readers of this blog may recall we banged the Subject Access Request drum prior to May 2018. We noted an operational enterprise search and eDiscovery was required to effectively comply with many of the core data discovery-focused requirements of GDPR. Under the GDPR, a European resident can request — potentially on a whim — that all data an enterprise holds on them be identified and also be removed. Organizations are required to establish a capability to respond to these Subject Access Requests (SARs). Forrester Research notes that “Data Discovery and classification are the foundation of GDPR compliance.” This is because, according to Forrester, GDPR effectively requires that an organization be able to identify and actually locate, with precision, personal data of EU data subjects across the organization.
Failure to respond to SARs has already led to fines and enforcement actions against several companies, including Google and the successor entity to Cambridge Analytica. This shows that many organizations are failing to understand the operational reality of GDPR compliance. This point is effectively articulated by a recent practice update from the law firm of DLA Piper on the GDPR, which states: “The scale of fines and risk of follow-on private claims under GDPR means that actual compliance is a must. GDPR is not a legal and compliance challenge – it is much broader than that, requiring organizations to completely transform the way that they collect, process, securely store, share and securely wipe personal data (emphasis added).”
These GDPR requirements can only be complied with through an effective enterprise eDiscovery search capability:
To achieve GDPR compliance, organizations must ensure that explicit policies and procedures are in place for handling personal information, and just as importantly, the ability to prove that those policies and procedures are being followed and operationally enforced. What has always been needed is gaining immediate visibility into unstructured distributed data across the enterprise, through the ability to search and report across several thousand endpoints and other unstructured data sources, and returning results within minutes instead of days or weeks. The need for such an operational capability is further heightened by the urgency of GDPR compliance.
X1 Distributed GRC represents a unique approach, by enabling enterprises to quickly and easily search across multiple distributed endpoints and data servers from a central location. Legal and compliance teams can easily perform unified complex searches across both unstructured content and metadata, obtaining statistical insight into the data in minutes, instead of days or weeks. With X1, organizations can also automatically migrate, collect, delete, or take other action on the data as a result of the search parameters. Built on our award-winning and patented X1 Search technology, X1 Distributed GRC is the first product to offer true and massively scalable distributed searching that is executed in its entirety on the end-node computers for data audits across an organization. This game-changing capability vastly reduces costs while effectuating that all-too-elusive actual compliance with information governance programs, including GDPR.