In 2020 the Irish data protection commissioner issued it’s first fines to Tusla & Twitter and saw an increase in customer complaints by 9% over 2019 and increased it’s funding from €1.6 million to €16.9 million in anticipation of future investigations. Their latest report highlights their increased scrutiny of cookie use (based on
e-Privacy law), direct marketing violations, employee monitoring issues, access requests and fair proecessing amongst other things.
For companies, meeting these new compliance obligations has been challenging as Mazars reporting bears this out in it’s recent GDPR survey. It reported that only 8% of firms consider themselves as fully compliant while 61% feel overwhelmed by administrative burden and 28% do not have basic record of documentation. Perhaps most importantly 71% of firms reported a personal data breach to authorities.
Other reporting from the Reuters 2020 cost of compliance report tells us that data protection is a top 3 challenge globally for compliance departments as the twin challenges of regulatory overhead and skills shortages hit hard. With this regulatory landscape in mind, it’s not surprising that firms are increasingly looking at all all options including outsourced services as a risk mitigation measure to “stay on top of things” in their approach to data protection.
This is where we see a value add to organisations who are rising to the challenge of GDPR. Our data protection officer service (DPOaaS) offers you a flexible approach to staffing your compliance function.
Our service offering provides you with a technical and legal savvy resource who can provide interim or extended period services on a competitive day rate basis. We can register as your DPO of record and handle all interactions with the DPC office and become a central point of contact for formal queries or complaints from customers.
Effective data privacy is based on a solid understanding of legal principles and effective communication. Communication with supervisory authorities, customers, processors and internal stakeholders at all levels of the organisation. This is an area we believe we excel in.
