Business apps are not ready for EU's GDPR rules

Time is relentless. The GDPR is moving ever closer, while at the same time apps aren’t. And that’s a huge problem for businesses, because if apps are not GDPR-compliant, they’re not GDPR complaint. That can mean huge fines, possibly even the end of businesses.

The fact that apps are far away from being GDPR compliant came as a result of a new and extensive study by Blue Coat Labs. The company analyzed more than 15,000 enterprise cloud applications in use and 108 million enterprise documents stored and shared within them.

Cloud apps included Dropbox, Slack and Salesforce, all being rapidly adopted worldwide.

According to the report, entitled 1H 2016 Shadow Data Threat Report, businesses are running 20 times more cloud apps than they estimate. The majority is using an average of 841 across their extended networks.

More than one in ten (12 percent) of documents which are "broadly" shared, contain regulated information, or confidential data. That data could be anything, from legal information, to source code.

FREAK, Logjam, Heartbleed, and other vulnerabilities, can still be exploited at 11 percent of enterprise cloud apps, the report added.

The GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation, is a new EU document, set to come into force mid-2018. It will regulate how businesses use and share their customers’ data.

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