What are the benefits of an external GDPR assessment?
External GDPR assessments are completely objective. Unlike an internal assessment, each data management aspect of your business will be reviewed with a critical eye. This is exactly how your company would be reviewed by the regulatory body in the event of a data breach.
An external GDPR assessment also provides validity, demonstrating that your company undertook due diligence and did everything possible to mitigate the risk of a data breach or leak. That’s why impartiality at the assessment and audit stage is so important.
Why should you consider an external GDPR assessment?
When the UK’s data protection act adopted the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation on the 25th May 2018, businesses were given new data protection laws which they needed to abide by. The UK’s supervisory authority, the Information Commissioner’s Office, was also given increased power to hand out larger fines. At this time, many organisations made a concerted effort to comply with the new law. Businesses hired data protection officers, revamped their cookie statements and privacy policies, and analysed how personal data flowed through their organisation. In the time since then, GDPR has fallen out of the spotlight and unfortunately other business tasks can take priority over data protection.
If you are concerned about your organisation’s on-going implementation of the GDPR, an external GDPR audit is the best way to get an independent, objective analysis of how your organisation is performing. External assessments can highlight flaws in your approach to data management and data security. They can reduce the likelihood of data breaches occurring and reduce their severity when they do occur. The results of an external assessment gives you advice on industry best practice and provides you with guidance on GDPR governance.
How are GDPR audits performed?
Tacita’s GDPR audits are performed entirely remotely. This allows us to offer our clients a highly flexible schedule when it comes to the delivery of our work. By performing audits in this manner, we create large savings on travel and other overheads, savings which we pass onto our clients. This is one of the reasons why we are able to offer such a competitively priced GDPR audit. A typically Tacita audit takes place over 3-5 business days.
Will an audit make my business GDPR compliant?
Complying with the GDPR can generally be split into two parts. The first is making the correct decisions with regards to data protection. The second is having procedures for documenting these decisions so that you can prove your compliance. Tacita’s GDPR audit will help on both these fronts.
Tacita’s audit asks a suite of questions covering all areas of the GDPR. The audit will identify where you have gaps and weaknesses in your compliance environment which are summarised in a GDPR compliance report. This report contains recommendations on how to improve your GDPR compliance and prioritises these actions for you. By following Tacita’s recommendations, you are steered towards the correct data protection decisions and are shown how to properly document them. This improves your organisations overall GDPR compliance and greatly reduces the risk of data breaches occurring and reduces their severity when they do.
How long does an audit take?
Our audits usually take an elapsed time of c.3-7 business days from initial assessment to completion. This includes the time it takes our team to write up our findings from the assessment.
Who from our business will need to take part in the audit?
For us to conduct an in-depth assessment of how data is collected and managed within your company, we will need to speak to some of the key members of your team involved in data collection and handling.
Each company is organised differently, but the most common roles that we involve are;
- Data Protection Office or Privacy Manager - the lead person on privacy in your organisation
- Procurement Manager – the custodian of the correct contracting with third parties that process personal data on your behalf, and can be responsible for engaging contract staff whose personal data needs protecting
- IT/IS manager – usually the architect of the Technical and Organisational Measures that you should create.
- HR manager – due to the personal data of employees
How much do your GDPR audits cost?
Tacita charges based on the set of interviews that need to be performed for a company. For most companies one set of interviews is sufficient. For some (larger) companies with multiple locations, multiple sets of company policies and multiple Human Resource/IT departments, multiple sets of interviews are required. Simply get in touch with our team today and we’ll ask you some basic questions which will allow us to give you a cost estimate.
