With less than six months before the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect - it is crucial that companies are prepared and taking the necessary steps to ensure they are GDPR compliant.
By becoming GDPR compliant before May 25th, 2018, and ensuring that your supply chain is also GDPR compliant, you will have a competitive advantage over less-prepared competitors, appealing to consumers as prepared, trustworthy, and reputable.
But what is the importance of supply chain audits for GDPR compliance?
There are many new features that come with GDPR, including a requirement to ensure that anyone and everyone within your supply chain is also compliant with GDPR.
This can affect businesses in two ways:
- If you are a current supplier you may be asked to demonstrate your own compliance. Guidelines say that companies that are too small or don’t comply should be removed from your supplier roster. What could that mean to your business?
- Anyone that holds, uses, purchases, or provides your data, the onus is on you to ensure their compliance. A data breach within an organisation’s supply chain could be devastating, from both a financial and a reputational perspective, regardless of where it occurs in the supply chain. It is inevitable that if a breach occurs, contractual negotiations with suppliers to shift liability will take place. Therefore, it is important that as an organization, you carry out appropriate checks and audits on suppliers to ensure GDPR compliance and a lower risk of a serious breach.