GDPR Survey

GDPR legislation will come into full effect on May 25th 2018, enshrining full accountability for personal Data Protection. Processing, retaining and sharing Data which contains personal or personal sensitive information will be subject to stringent new rules and all organisations handling Data will need to be prepared for this. Waterford Technologies conducted a survey on our client base and the wider marketplace during October and November 2017 and some of the findings were surprising, even for our experts who deal with Data Management issues every day.

Survey Delivery

In October and November 2017, we carried out a survey with a focus on Data Management, Compliance and GDPR.

We polled 2,050 decision makers from our client database and across many industries in Ireland, Europe and the UK in the following roles:

IT Directors and Managers

Data Protection Officers

CIOs

Compliance Managers

Legal representatives

From the 1,500 responses, we summarised the findings of this survey to spotlight the challenges that organisations experience at the moment in terms of Data Protection and especially GDPR readiness and preparation.

Massive Email “Fail”

Although organisations still conduct the vast majority of business communications through email, a staggering 87% of survey respondents had not made any proper planning provision for dealing with email for GDPR. Either completely overlooking email or wrongly considering it to be within the Structured Data category as opposed to Unstructured Data (which it is), was the biggest single surprise.

50-50

Just around half (51%) of our respondents already have a properly developed Data Management plan in motion for GDPR, leaving a very tight timeline for the remainder to get a strategy and begin work on a project to align to the new legislation coming out in May. Responsible people will need to act early and fast in 2018 to get off the blocks.

Personal Data

82% of emails can be classified as containing Personal Data which is subject to GDPR audit and compliance. Worryingly, 52% of survey respondents revealed that there was not a complete awareness of the potential results of non-compliance with GDPR regulations on Personal Data.