When you first established your company, you probably haven’t thought too much about all the rules that you will need to follow if you want to survive on the market. Sure, you’ve made plans and strategies that were to lead you towards success, but that’s not what I am talking about. Instead, I am talking about frameworks and regulations such as GDPR, further explained here.

Soon after you’ve stared doing business, though, you have realized that some of those frameworks and regulations are mandatory, and that you cannot keep operating on the market without adhering to them. That’s when you begin getting more interested in the regulations. Given that you are here, it is safe to say that you are now interested in finding out more about the General Data Protection Regulation.

Well, the good news is that GDPR is precisely our topic for the day. So, since you are interested in figuring out whether you have to adhere to these regulations or not, the right thing to do is keep on reading. You’ll learn not only whether this is a necessity, but also how to achieve the compliance should you decide to do so. We will talk about it all one thing at a time, and we will start with the basics.

What Exactly Is GDPR?

As mentioned, we are going to start with the basics. That means that the first thing we have to do is ensure that you understand the GPDR in general. After all, there is undeniably no point in talking about the compliance requirements and rules if you’re not even sure what these regulations are in the first place. So, if you’re not sure, it is time to change that and make everything perfectly clear.

In the simplest words possible, GDPR is basically a set of privacy laws that were designed to protect the residents of the European Union. To be more precise, these were designed to protect the personal information of customers in regards to financial transactions. These types of rules are definitely quite necessary, because every company needs to offer some kind of protection to their customers in order for them to feel safe when doing transactions.

Do You Need To Be GDPR Compliant?

In case you didn’t previously have an idea as to what GDPR is, I am sure that you now understand that perfectly. And, I am also sure that another important question has popped into mind now that you have a much better idea about what those regulations are. In short, you are wondering whether you actually have to be compliant.

So, you want to know if this is mandatory, or if it is actually an option that you can choose to use or not to use. Let me cut to the chase and tell you right away that GDPR compliance is actually mandatory for all companies doing business in the European Union. Now, there is a common mistake that people make when they hear about this framework being mandatory for EU.

In short, they assume that it is mandatory only for those companies that are located in the EU. While this is quite a logical assumption, it is actually not correct. If you take your time to carefully read the explanation, you’ll notice that it says something completely different. Simply put, it says that the GDPR compliance is mandatory for companies doing business in the EU, regardless of their physical location. Thanks to online shopping and Internet in general, you now don’t need to be located in the EU in order to have customers and clients from that area.

If you’re wondering what will happen if you fail to comply, this should help you understand: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/reform/rules-business-and-organisations/enforcement-and-sanctions/sanctions/what-if-my-company-organisation-fails-comply-data-protection-rules_en 

How To Achieve The Compliance?

Since this is actually mandatory, it goes without saying that you now want to figure out how to actually achieve the necessary compliance. This is the logical course of thoughts. One of the most significant things to understand here is that you’ll need help in order to achieve the goal that you are after. The great thing is, there are some firms on the market that have done everything in their power to help businesses ensure that they adhere to GDPR.

The companies I am talking about allow you to actually assess your current security programs and check how well they comply with certain major and important frameworks, including GDPR. So, the first thing to do is find one of those companies and get the security assessment that you need. Together with the assessment results, you’ll get recommendations on how to improve and you’ll get familiar with the requirements you need to meet. Thus, after doing the assessment, your task is to follow those recommendations while keeping the requirements in mind. This will lead you towards getting GDPR compliant.