In the past six months alone, more than half of the world’s population has been significantly impacted by large-scale security incidents, most of which originated from insufficient data privacy measures. In today’s threat landscape, threat actors can implement malicious campaigns to remotely steal sensitive data that is pivotal to a company’s growth and competitive advantage. To evade detection and maintain persistence, threat actors continue to enhance their attack methodologies at rates faster than most organizations could ever handle. As such, having a robust data privacy program is no longer a “nice to have” item; it is a business necessity.
In a concerted effort to combat emerging data privacy threats and vulnerabilities, government and industry actors continue to introduce newer and updated data privacy compliance requirements that are often unfamiliar to average organizations with limited resources. Therefore, implementing a Chief-Privacy-Officer-as-a-Service (CPOaaS) solution is the first step to developing a robust and effective data privacy program.
With an outsourced Chief Privacy Officer on board, your organization benefits from an up-to-date knowledge bank, a cost-effective structure, and an enhanced mean-time-to implementation only available at a data privacy powerhouse. This article will describe the role of an outsourced Privacy Officer in your daily business operations and why the CPOaaS is the best solution for your corporate data privacy program.
The Role of a Chief Privacy Officer (CPOaaS)
Most companies confuse data security and data privacy. Although both concepts are often used interchangeably, data security focuses on protecting digital assets while data privacy focuses on how critical information is collected, stored, transmitted, and destroyed. Therefore, a Chief Privacy Officer (CPO) ensures that the lifecycle of sensitive data is aligned with domestic and international compliance regulations and unique use cases.
As more data privacy regulators scrutinize how corporate-controlled personally identifiable information (PII) is protected, a significant component of a CPO’s role focuses on taking a risk-based approach to data management. This risk-based approach to data management is often time-consuming, expensive, and difficult to maintain internally. Therefore, incorporating an outsourced model to achieve a Chief Privacy Officer as a service (CPOaaS) solution guarantees that your organization benefits from privacy-compliant policies and standards; the implementation and management of data privacy programs; and collaboration with the risk management department (legal, human resources, IT security and governance, law enforcement, etc.).
The key benefits of an outsourced CPOaaS solution
The top three benefits of outsourcing CPOaaS solution include cost-effectiveness benefit, time-saving benefit, and the benefit of up-to-date expert knowledge. Although each organization will benefit over the other, each benefit helps boost business continuity and overall profitability.
The cost-effective and time-saving benefits of an outsourced CPOaaS solution provide an organization with the flexibility to control scalability, depending on their needs and requirements. These benefits eliminate the need for organizations to exhaust their financial resources and time training an in-house CPO while still maintaining healthy key performance indicator (KPI) metrics such as Mean Time To Acknowledge (MTTA), Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF), Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR), Mean Time To Failure (MTTF), etc.
Additionally, an outsourced CPOaaS solution is equipped with battle-tested experts capable of collaborating with stakeholders to shape corporate policies, goals, and strategies that promote a health data privacy awareness culture. By outsourcing the CPOaaS solution, your organization can appropriately align itself with new data privacy strategies informed by security, legal, and compliance standards.
Why is an outsourced CPOaaS the best solution?
An outsourced CPOaaS provides the best solution in terms of privacy policy compliance. It increases the data security posture of the organization through well-defined and repeatable processes. It comes with some collaborating and influencing skills critical to the successful prioritization and management of a resultant crisis in the face of a breach. These solutions are up-to-date with new skills due to the ever-evolving threats and regulations in the privacy law landscape. Outsourced CPOaaS provides the best solution in the following avenues:
- Development of effective privacy policies
- Compliance readiness and management
- Rapid data breach and incident response planning
- Data resource management
CONCLUSION
We live in an era where businesses collect and store the PII of their customers, employees, vendors, and other third-party associates. These PII are extremely valuable to daily business operations as well as threat actors. With the growing sophistication and pervasiveness of threat actors, organizations have to contend with targeted privacy-related threats ranging from form jacking to ransomware attacks.
In today’s global economy, customers and regulators aim for aggressive solutions to combat the growing threats against corporate privacy. Therefore, organizations unprepared to align their IT infrastructure with the evolving data privacy landscape often face a hefty fine. The CPOaaS solution at Goldsky proactively delivers sustained value and continuous improvement for a resilient business continuity posture. We adopt a maturity model to assist our clients in developing a risk-based approach to data privacy programs, drafting relevant policies and procedures, devising a plan to remediate data privacy threats and incidents across diverse business sectors.
