Organizations shouldn’t settle for outdated data privacy solutions
Data privacy is a big deal for modern enterprises, with 44% of CEOs now saying that data privacy policies are among their businesses’ top concerns. In the post-GDPR world, the regulatory landscape is growing increasingly far-reaching and complex: by 2023, it’s expected that 65% of the world’s population will be covered by modern privacy regulations, up from just 10% in 2020.
Complying with all those rules isn’t cheap. By 2018, Fortune Global 500 companies had spent $7.8 billion preparing for GDPR. Three years later, the average cost of data privacy compliance for multinational corporations is still over $3.5 million per year. But despite these investments, people don’t feel more secure. In fact, almost half of Americans believe their data is less secure than it was five years ago, and 45% say they’ve been personally impacted by data breaches.
What does this all mean for your business? Well, with regulators and consumers paying close attention, it means you need to put a tough, effective data-privacy solution in place. But the industry is constantly evolving, so the data-privacy tools that suited your business a year or two ago may not be the best solutions for the new regulatory and technological challenges you’re now facing. To keep your business and your customers safe, it’s essential to keep on evolving, and to ensure you’re using up-to-date tools that are optimized for your organization’s current needs.
Has your tech stack gone stale?
Your data privacy solutions shouldn’t require constant attention and oversight — that’s why they’re called “solutions,” after all. But that doesn’t mean you can have a hands off approach to your data-privacy tech stack. No matter how good your privacy solution was when it was first implemented, time marches on.
First-generation data privacy solutions took a formulaic, responsive approach: checklists, reflexive efforts to patch privacy gaps or compliance risks, and cookie-based quick fixes and were the order of the day. That was a necessary first step toward ensuring data privacy. But in today’s more complex and interconnected world, such tools can’t deliver the robust, flexible solutions needed to orchestrate rich, ever-changing consent signals seamlessly across organizations’ entire data ecosystems.
Enterprises now operate across multiple jurisdictions, and need to manage consumers’ privacy across multiple domains, devices, and touchpoints. Customers’ privacy expectations must be honored across your organization, and also in downstream partners’ data systems — even if those systems weren’t built with privacy in mind. The data privacy challenges organizations now face have evolved significantly, and new solutions are needed to meet those challenges.
Even if you’ve already built out your data privacy infrastructure, in other words, it’s worth taking some time to diagnose the gaps or shortcomings that may have emerged over time, and to ask whether newer technologies would be better suited to your needs. Now more than ever, the way you handle privacy speaks volumes about your brand, so it’s important to ensure you’re leveraging the latest innovations to deliver the best-in-class data privacy experience that consumers expect.
It’s time for a checkup
How can you ensure you’re using the right privacy platform for your needs? It’s as simple as conducting a brief review process to clarify your current priorities, assess whether they’re still being met by your existing provider, and figure out whether other solutions would do a better job of meeting your needs.
Think of it as the equivalent of going for a physical: set aside a bit of time each year for a tech review, and you can ensure your privacy infrastructure remains healthy, up to date, and able to withstand whatever challenges emerge over the following 12 months.
What should you cover during this checkup? Well, the aim isn’t to run complicated pilot studies or to reinvent the wheel by rebuilding your data infrastructure from the ground up. Instead, you should simply aside some time to take the pulse of your existing solution, explore what else is out there, and make sure you’re using the best available tools for your specific use-case.
It’s worth asking, for instance, whether your existing solution can handle the full range of rules and regulations that affect your business — and those that could affect your business as it grows or enters new market sectors or jurisdictions. It’s also worth asking whether the tools you’re using are doing enough to ensure seamless, fully automated, and verifiable orchestration of data subject requests or consent signals across your entire ecosystem, including outside partners. And it’s always worth paying attention to the user experience: are you able to customize privacy messaging, styling, and timing to ensure your end-users have a pleasant and on-brand experience when using your site or service?
These are just some starting points — check out the Ketch buyer’s guide for a full breakdown of the issues you should aim to address while reviewing your data privacy infrastructure. Bear in mind, too, that the best time to embark on this process is before you renew your vendor contract for another year. You wouldn’t sign a new contract without doing due diligence, and neither should you renew with an existing vendor without making sure it’s truly the right move for your business.
Give Ketch a call
At Ketch, we know that in today’s increasingly complex and demanding world, enterprises can’t afford to compromise when it comes to managing data privacy. We’re also confident that our data privacy technologies are the best solution for virtually any use-case, and that our best-of-breed technology can measure up to anything else on the market.
We think you’ll feel the same. That’s why we encourage you to consider your evolving needs, take a long, hard look at our competitors—and then reach out to Ketch. When you’re ready, our team will be standing by to help you analyze your needs, identify the data-privacy approach that’s right for you, and implement a resilient, best-in-class solution optimized for the unique needs of your organization.
