Your organization’s data estate is likely large and diverse. It may consist of personally identifiable information (PII), sensitive or confidential data like financial records and intellectual property (IP), and digital data like browser cookies and online purchase histories.
If any of this data falls into the wrong hands, it could damage your reputation and customer relationships, and also have serious financial repercussions. The loss of PII could also affect the data subjects by making them vulnerable to criminal activities like fraud, blackmail, and identify theft.
You can avoid these situations by protecting your data and its privacy. To do this, you must implement robust measures to i) control data access, ii) protect its confidentiality, availability, and integrity, and iii) maintain compliance with all relevant data privacy laws and standards.
If you already have implemented these measures, your business can effectively protect its data and comply with applicable regulations. But if you haven’t, the first place to start is with a data privacy assessment.
Let’s see what such assessments entail and explore how your firm can benefit from Inspira’s privacy assessment service.
What is Data Privacy and Why Does It Matter?
Data privacy is concerned with how an organization collects, stores, manages, uses, and disposes data. Privacy procedures and controls focus on governing who can access sensitive or private data, and whether the firm is complying with relevant data protection and privacy regulations.
These procedures are important because they can help your organization to properly manage valuable data assets in line with customers’ expectations. Doing this will make your data management practices more transparent, which will enable you to build trust with customers and other stakeholders.
Implementing – or strengthening – your data privacy procedures and controls will also enable you to abide with relevant regulatory obligations as you collect, store, and process data – particularly personal data. Non-compliance could result in huge fines from regulatory bodies and damage your reputation. Financial damages could be even worse if the business experiences a data breach that occurred because you didn’t pay (enough) attention to data privacy.
What is a Data Privacy Assessment and How Does Inspira Do It?
A data privacy assessment is usually conducted by a cybersecurity advisory or consulting firm for client companies in many industries and countries. Firms like Inspira have a global team of security and compliance experts who bring advanced skills and expertise to perform such assessments. Each privacy assessment involves a comprehensive evaluation of a firm’s data privacy practices and procedures. Its primary aim is to identify, assess, and classify all the sensitive stored in various data systems, and evaluate if appropriate policies and procedures are in place to protect the data.
Another goal is to assess if the organization is fully compliant with all the global privacy standards and laws that apply – both globally applicable laws like GDPR and sector-specific regulations like HIPAA and PCI DSS. Inspira’s assessment experts have advanced expertise in all major data privacy regulations, which is very valuable for companies that need to comply with these laws. At the same time, Inspira’s privacy specialists are also well-versed with privacy laws and bills that are not as well-known to other cybersecurity advisory firms. One example of such a bill is India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Bill (DPDPB) that was introduced to Parliament in August 2023 and could become law in the near future.
Why You Need Inspira’s Data Privacy Assessment Service
A detailed data privacy assessment from an experienced partner is essential to understand if there are any data security and compliance gaps in your organization. These gaps may make you vulnerable to costly data breaches and increase the risk of regulatory punishments. You must close these gaps to demonstrate that you properly handle all sensitive and personal data, and are able to meet all compliance obligations.
When conducted by a cybersecurity expert like Inspira, a comprehensive assessment will also strengthen your data privacy program by helping you to:
- Get full visibility into all the data residing in any part of the organization
- Prepare a detailed inventory of all data, including data types, formats, sources, flows, locations, and destinations
- Identify who has access to what kind of data and what level of access they have
- Identify and evaluate the key risks to sensitive data
- Demonstrate compliance to all stakeholders, both internal (e.g., board members) and external (e.g., regulatory bodies)
Furthermore, our cross-functional team of privacy lawyers, data officers, and other experts will provide recommendations and actionable guidance to help you close the gaps in your privacy program – from both security and compliance perspectives. These recommendations will be part of a risk remediation plan that will be customized for your specific business needs, data estate, risk landscape, and compliance obligations.
What Does Inspira’sa Data Privacy Assessment Involve?
As an experienced and knowledgeable data privacy assessment provider, Inspira always starts every privacy assessment by first defining its scope and objectives. To this end, we will look to answer questions like:
- What are the key outcomes the client is looking for?
- What are the biggest challenges your the firm is currently facing with data privacy: keeping up with regulations, implementing security measures, ensuring employee compliance, balancing data privacy requirements with business objectives, etc.
- Which global standards and/or sectoral laws should the client comply with?
- Does the client you have a risk management program and how effective is it at identifying vulnerabilities to data and helping them firm comply with privacy laws?
Next, we identify the client firm’s various data activities and processes and the data types and users associated with them. Next, we create a comprehensive data inventory which helps us to better understand the client company’s data lifecycle and estate.
The next important activity we undertake is to evaluate whether the identified data activities comply with relevant data privacy/protection regulations. Our risk experts also surface and analyze data privacy risks and prioritize them based on a thorough analysis of potential impact and likelihood.
Finally, our auditors will prepare a detailed data privacy report that includes elements like:
- Strengths and weaknesses of the client’s data privacy program, including its procedures, controls, and policies
- Areas of non-compliance
- List of potential risks to sensitive data
- Remediation guidance and step-by-step suggestions to address identified issues
Most of the clients we work with ask for a data privacy action plan with goals and timelines for each action – which we are happy to provide. We also monitor and review the plan’s progress and update it as needed to help the organization meet their data privacy and compliance goals, and enable them to respond quickly to new and changing regulations.
Ready to Transform Your Data Protection and Privacy Program?
Inspira’s time-tested, customizable data privacy assessment service is designed for organizations looking to better protect their sensitive data and achieve compliance with all mandatory privacy laws. Our offering supports diverse regulatory requirements – both well-known laws like GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, etc. and less well-known emerging laws like India’s DPDPB. As part of the assessment, we will provide a detailed report and tailored suggestions that will help you strengthen risk management and improve your internal data privacy-related processes.
