Whether you’re reviewing your existing data-privacy toolkit or actively shopping for a new solution, it’s important to have a clear idea of the core features that you’ll need to meet current and future challenges. Many data privacy solutions only encompass a subset of these features, so it’s important to have a clear must-have feature list as you seek out a solution to keep your organization’s data safe and compliant.
Let’s take a look at five key capabilities that should come fitted as standard when you adopt a new consent management and data rights solution.
1. Managing data flows.
The ability to manage the way data flows through your organization, and ensure compliance with users’ wishes and regulatory requirements, is the most basic and most important role of any data privacy solution. Without this core functionality, there’s simply no way to ensure compliance or implement your team’s internal data policies.
The key here is to seek out solutions that integrate seamlessly into your organization’s workflows and dataflows. A solution that ensures regulatory compliance but cripples your team’s ability to leverage data to deliver functionality is worse than no solution at all. You need a solution that allows you to extract value from data, in whatever way is most important to your organization, while still rigorously adhering to your customers’ expectations and your regulatory obligations.
2. Handling regulatory complexity.
The regulatory landscape isn’t getting any simpler, and organizations need tools that can make sense of the patchwork of rules and statutes that affect their business. This requires the ability to navigate multiple regulatory regimes simultaneously, without conflict or redundancy, and to enforce data privacy effectively even as data flows between jurisdictions. If you’re doing business in the European Union, you’ll face very different challenges and requirements than if you’re operating in California — and you need a system that can seamlessly handle both situations.
You may also find your regulatory obligations change as your business model evolves, the rules get rewritten, or you move into new markets. You need a data privacy toolkit that’s flexible enough to adapt to your changing needs, granular enough to be localized depending on the markets you’re selling into, and comprehensive enough to apply the right regulations in the right way and at the right time, with zero margin for error.
3. Delivering on-brand experiences.
When you’re poring over privacy statutes, it’s easy to forget that privacy isn’t just about keeping regulators happy — it’s also something your customers experience every time they use your product. That means you’ll need a solution that can deliver on-brand experiences for your customers as frictionlessly as possible. If a given solution can only spit out boilerplate privacy notifications delivered in a generic format, your customers will resent the intrusion into their experience of your website or product.
The solution? Demand software that empowers you to customize the user experience, and make more mindful decisions about the specific language that’s used, the way notifications are styled, and how they integrate into the end-user’s experience of your website or service. Your marketers will relish the ability to create messages in your brand’s unique voice, and you’ll find it far easier to create a trusting and hassle-free experience for your customers or audiences.
4.Ensuring privacy everywhere.
It isn’t enough to provide effective data privacy when users visit your main webpage. You also need to make sure their data is handled appropriately when they use mobile apps or other access-points — and also potentially when using internal data systems to manage employees’ information. You need a solution that can orchestrate consent and data subject requests across all those touchpoints, as seamlessly and automatically as possible.
This is especially important when orchestrating data requests and consent signals beyond the confines of your own organization. External partners who access your data need to honor those signals, but many data-privacy tools require coordination to be handled manually, or fire off form emails to notify partners of their obligations. That creates room for human error, so seek out a solution that can rapidly propagate consent changes and data requests across your whole ecosystem, with built-in verification processes and little or no human involvement.
5. Keeping everyone happy.
Data privacy is a perennial source of tension between legal and IT teams. It’s easy to see why: your legal experts need to be able to set policies for your whole organization, without fretting about technical implementation, and your IT teams need to be able to update code or make changes to data infrastructure without worrying about legal issues.
To smooth things out, it’s important to find a solution that lets you issue regulatory interpretations without rebuilding data tools, and also lets you rebuild data systems and overwrite blocks of code without impacting the flow of consent signals through your business. Many solutions are designed to serve either IT or legal teams, but to avoid expensive headaches down the road it’s worth seeking out a solution that can keep everyone happy.
Different solutions will aim to address many of these capabilities in different ways and to different degrees, but the reality is that all five of these core capabilities for any data privacy solution. If you find yourself questioning whether a given technology can tick all these boxes, it’s a sign that you should move on and look for other options.
Once you’ve put together a shortlist of data privacy solutions that can succeed in these five key areas, you’ll need to give further thought to your own specific use-cases and needs, and start to assign weight to other factors. If you’re on a tight budget, then cost might be a critical differentiator for you. In other cases, you might feel that cost is less of an issue, but that best-in-breed data security and compliance are key priorities. By figuring out which features are must-haves, and ranking your remaining requirements by order of priority, you’ll begin to see which solutions are real contenders.
At Ketch, we’re committed to delivering the must-have functionality our customers need to effectively manage data privacy. We’re confident that our solutions can hold their own against anything else that’s on the market. But don’t take our word for it. Think about your priorities, take a careful look at our rivals’ offerings — then give us a chance to show you why we’re the right solution for your organization.
