50 percent of employees believe their businesses aren't ready for GDPR

With the EU's GDPR legislation less than a year away from coming into force, a new study reveals that half of employees believe their companies aren't ready for it.

The survey, carried out by Usurv for Storage Made Easy asked 200 employees a simple question on whether they believe their company is ready for the upcoming data protection law.

"The General Data Protection Regulations are the most stringent update of data privacy and protection regulations for many years," says Jim Liddle, Storage Made Easy CEO. "They affect all businesses whether large or small and potentially could have the effect of putting some companies out of business if they are in breach of certain aspects of the regulations. Companies are going to need to ensure they understand their data estate, be that on-cloud or on-premises, and that they implement strict enforcement controls which will should include discovery, audit, encryption and policy settings."

Fines under GDPR are hefty, they can be up to 4 percent of a companies gross turnover as opposed to the current £500,000 (around $650,000) limit imposed by the existing UK Data Protection Act.

Liddle adds: "As a UK company that is affected by GDPR we have worked very hard on ensuring our File Fabric product work as an enforcement gateway across all company data sets to help protect existing corporate data, and this definitely shows in the upturn of inquires and sales that we are fielding in relation to GDPR."

To help companies prepare for GDPR, Storage Made easy has produced two free whitepapers which are available to download from the company’s site.

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