With less than 50 days to go until the May 25 GDPR compliance deadline, many organizations are hurriedly preparing their data, processes and procedures. While the high fines are ringing in everyone’s ears providing a constant reminder to comply, we think there are a number of positives that can be taken from the regulation.

Greater transparency is going to the key to the success of your GDPR strategy. This will ensure that both your colleagues and customers understand their rights and document how you process/handle their data. By being more transparent you will help to build trust with both your staff and customers as they know their data is being used in an open, lawful and honest manner.

Data is the heart of the GDPR. We think the process undertaken to review and clean your data estate and remove out of date/un-unused data will leave the organization with high quality data that you can rely on for decision making. Clean data will not only help you to target new customers more accurately, respond to SAR requests quicker, maintain ongoing readiness with regulations and build on the company’s reputation for good practice with current and future customers, partners and investors.

Processes and policies need to be reviewed and, in some cases, re-written to ensure readiness. Take the time to review your internal processes – for example, is there a better and more efficient way you can process data? Are there new processes you can put in place to help streamline how your organization operates? Undergoing this process can have unforeseen benefits – who knows, maybe you will uncover a new competitive advantage!

Rights. Under the GDPR data subjects have six new rights to their data, including but not limited to the right to be removed, the right to access a copy of the information and the right to prevent processing for direct marketing etc. Responding quickly and efficiently to these requests before the 40-calendar day maximum will satisfy both your data subjects and the regulators and help you to improve overall customer satisfaction.

We believe organizations of all sizes should stop fearing the GDPR and seeing it as laborious task, and instead start to see the many advantages created by the readiness process.

Jennifer Jones has been working within the data discovery technology sector for over five years, helping organizations to realize the potential of their data. Connexica is a company passionate about creating next generation data discovery solutions that meet ever-changing needs and challenges.