What IT Leaders Need to Know About the Future of Data Privacy
Contrary to what many executives may believe, privacy is not just a question of removing regulatory drag and achieving compliance. Privacy is about propelling the business forward.
Above all things, privacy is personal, and the average consumer does actually care what companies do with their data. In other words, customers will leave if they can’t see the measures that businesses are taking to protect their personal data. Such privacy concerns will become more urgent in the years to come.
Gartner predicts that by 2024, large organizations’ average annual budgets for privacy will exceed $2.5 million, allowing a shift from compliance ethics to competitive differentiation. Through 2026, organizations that mishandle personal data will suffer three times more financial damage from class actions and mass claims than from enforcement sanctions.
The Gartner top trends in privacy showcase the critical levers that business leaders need to engage over the coming two years to manage liability and promote trust when handling personal information. Here are the six key trends driving the privacy landscape and what enterprise leaders can do about them.
The common denominator of many modern privacy regulations is a set of privacy rights granted to individuals. In the coming two years, over 60% of the world’s population will be able to freely exercise these rights — doubling today’s numbers.
Such regulations, along with increased consumer demand for transparency, are driving the need for a centralized privacy UX: a one stop shop where organizations provide users with information on what data of theirs is held and how it is used. This allows users to exercise their privacy rights and maintain control over their information.
To-do: Bring all aspects of privacy UX — notices, cookie management, consent, and subject rights — into one self-service portal. It’s imperative to do this incrementally and not attempt to boil the ocean overnight. For example, let’s say you oversee privacy at a university. Over time, invite different data owners across the organization to integrate their stores of personal information into the privacy portal. You might have the admissions and the registrar feed data into the privacy portal first, and later housing and athletics would join to provide a fuller view for students.
After a decade of work for businesses to embrace the cloud, a new trend in data residency risks reducing this momentum to a crawl. Data localization planning will shift to be a top priority in the design and acquisition of cloud services.
The push for data localization is driven by a few sub-trends:
To-do: Organizations will have to review and — when necessary — reengineer existing cloud deployments for modularity, invoking centralization where possible and localization where necessary.
