Are you ready to protect your customers’ personal data?

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation’s (GDPR) recent update imposes strict new requirements on any business that serves EU residents.

This includes Australia and those located in other countries and the penalties for non-compliance are stiff.

They are between 2 to 4 million euros, or 2 to 4 per cent of a company’s annual revenues, whichever is greater.

New responsibilities

These new privacy rules add many new responsibilities to any company that captures personal information about EU-based customers.

These responsibilities include:

1) taking much stronger measures to protect it against tampering, spying and theft;

2) reporting any security failures to authorities and to customers, if the breach is serious enough; and

3) giving customers much broader rights to access, correct and delete their personal data.

Waking up to a new reality

Many businesses are just waking up to this, previously not realising that they too are subject to it.

While they may have previously believed GDPR only applies to companies based in the EU, it applies to any company.

This is regardless of its location, that captures or handles the personal data of an EU resident.

Most businesses are confused as to where to start.

IT organisations correctly feel some type of pressure to build GDPR compliance plans.

Technology measures are only part of any GDPR compliance solution. Policies and procedures are equally important – but IT presents an obvious starting point.

Many IT operations professionals are scrambling for answers to tough questions they know will come when senior leadership become aware of the issue, namely, “What are we [meaning you] doing to prepare for this?”

GDPR’s opportunity for service providers

What does this mean for you?

The business challenges that result from this confusion and urgency to act are a golden opportunity for IT service providers.

You are in an excellent position to deliver consultative advice, technology building blocks, design and implementation direction, employee training and other kinds of value to customers.

Particularly, those who are struggling to get up the GDPR compliance path.

While the first-mover advantage is slipping away, your GDPR sales window has a long life.

Even though the new regulation recently went live, many of your customers can still be barely in the starting blocks.

A recent survey found that UK businesses are the best prepared for GDPR, followed by EU countries then followed by the rest of the world.

We have been here before.

Consider how long it takes some of them to upgrade their servers when an old Microsoft release goes into end-of-support.

Help your customers and your business

Are you ready to take advantage of this opportunity?

Help your prospects and customers solve a thorny time-sensitive business problem.

Acronis, a global leader in hybrid cloud data protection and storage, is here to help you with:

  • – Data protection and storage products and services that can help businesses address GDPR requirements.

Acronis data protection solutions, such as the award-winning Acronis Backup and multi-tier/multi-tenant Acronis Backup Cloud Backup-as-a-Service for service providers, are compatible with more than 20 types of data workloads in different environments.

Features like data encryption in transit and at rest provide a foundational basis for security of processing.

These features also add the ability to restrict storage and backup of personal data to approved secure locations in a global network of data centres.

  • – Educational materials in the form of articles and blog posts to help you and your customers understand GDPR terminology, its key requirements and some pragmatic, tactical steps you can help them take to move up the compliance path.
  • – A large collection of webinars, marketing assets and packaged campaign materials to help you nudge prospects steadily down the funnel to buying Acronis-based products and services to improve their GDPR compliance posture.

These include three business-oriented webinars, an infographic, FAQ and checklist and a multi-touch email campaign with banner ads, landing pages and calling scripts.

Ransomware protection

Acronis data protection solutions are supplemented with an AI-based Acronis Active Protection.

This defends businesses against ransomware, the world’s most pervasive malware threat and as such a major factor in compliance violations attributable to security breaches.

Active Protection is an extension to Acronis data protection products.

This uses machine learning and behavioural analysis to identify ransomware attacks in progress, shut them down and instantly repair any damage caused to personal data.

To illustrate this point, we put together “A tale of two ransomware attacks” infographic, that illustrates the benefits of Acronis technology.

Acronis also answers GDPR’s requirements.

They reinforce defences against malware attacks by providing a variety of easy-to-use tools that improve awareness of suspicious activity, including audit logs and dashboards with alerts and reporting.

Customisable data retention rules support GDPR’s mandate that businesses retain personal data only for the minimum period required.

Other features that go above and beyond the GDPR standard include Acronis Notary.

This feature stores unique fingerprints of personal data files in a public blockchain.

This allows businesses to verify the integrity of files retrieved from Acronis backup archives or storage.

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