The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took effect last Friday. At this moment it is important to ask: “What’s next?”
Were you able to ensure your company’s compliance with GDPR, send all the mandatory privacy policy update emails, and happily complete what you thought might be one of the most challenging tasks for your company in 2018? Well, we are sorry to break it to you, but it doesn’t stop there.
The GDPR was formed as a regulation to protect users and customers, and they have indeed been given the reins. It might not have happened to you yet over the last few days, but there will come a time when customers will request that your company delete all existing data about them. Or your company might have recognized that there are still large amounts of data in your BI environment that need to be anonymized. Either way, there is a heap data staring back at you, waiting to be handled.
The Big Mess
Some of the consultancy companies that MANTA works with have recognized that the biggest struggle connected with GDPR compliance is most likely tracking customer data across multiple databases. Companies must identify the various locations where sensitive or uncompliant data is being stored as well as discover the relationships between this data. Not all records are equally sensitive, not all need to be anonymized. Sometimes, only parts of the data need to be re-written (e.g., a name and a country code in the same table will most likely not lead to the identification of a customer, but adding a city name can end up leading to quite precise identification).
The complexity of today’s BI environments makes it almost impossible to search for these relations manually. Luckily, MANTA can automatically analyze all database objects and data processing logic within your database, and if an additional description about the level of sensitivity of each record is provided, it can identify the locations of sensitive records. Then you can eliminate all potential threats to compliance as well as make sure you didn’t fail to find a complete record of customer data.
Lucky for you, MANTA is still available, no matter whether the GDPR countdown has ended or not. If you think that you could use some serious help with tracking your data and automating your data lineage, schedule an informative call with our pre-sales guys. They are really friendly!
Or contact us at manta@getmanta.com. We are always up for a chat.