The Confederation of British Industry
(CBI), a UK business
lobbying organisation, has shared its concerns over the proposed changes to the
EU data protection regulations; specifically, the potential financial impact on
businesses as well as the risk of data compliance restrictions stifling
innovation.
The
CBI argues that many innovative business models, citing advertising and the
music industry as examples, rely on data-sharing to generate revenue and ensure
they are providing a tailored user experience and suggests that proposed
reforms would restrict businesses’ ability to do this.
In
addition to implementing data-sharing restrictions, the CBI highlights the financial
consequence of complying with the reforms. The European Commission claims that
its proposals will save businesses €2.3 billion a year,
across all EU countries, by creating a coherent and streamlined approval
process for organisations working across EU states. However, the CBI believes
that this is an overestimation of the business benefits and overlooks
compliance costs such as changing IT systems, re-training staff, implementing call
centres to handle data compliance issues and, in some cases, appointing a Data
Protection Officer. While costs are likely to be incurred in order to comply,
businesses need to carefully consider the potential cost should they
suffer a data breach.
Businesses could potentially face
fines of up to two percent of their revenues should they fail to report a
breach in the 24 hour time period and the cost to brand reputation should not
be overlooked either, as recently demonstrated in the news reports surrounding Global Payments’ data breach.
Those
that choose to implement a document management system mitigate the risk of
suffering a data breach and incurring huge fines as their documents containing
sensitive data are stored in a central, secure system. Other cost burdens that
the CBI highlight, such as re-training and IT refresh, would also be
significantly reduced, if not eliminated, as the document system is integrated
with existing IT infrastructure, improving ease of use.
Click here
to find out more about how a document management system could help improve your
data protection processes.
