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How Data Minimisation Can Reduce Company Risk

Excess data is a vulnerability for your business, minimise your data to reduce risk

Data Minimisation plays an important role under GDPR where data you store should not be held or used further, unless this is for essential reasons that were stated clearly in advance in order to support data privacy and should therefore be removed. While the General Data Protection Regulation has not been enacted in the US, it may be and with similar regulations like the California Data Protection Act, it would be wise to prepare.
Data minimisation means only storing the data that is necessary and relevant whilst reducing your costs and protecting your company. Despite the large amounts of data that may seem like a big task to store and manage, data minimisation should be a top priority for any business.

Why is Data Minimisation important?

1. Easier Access to Data

The first reason why data minimisation is important is that it is easier to access and sort your data. In the incident of a DSAR request you want to make sure that your data is readily available with the relevant information you require without having to sift through hours’ worth of data. Services such as ComplyKey mean you can easily organise data through archiving, encryption, and indexing on the cloud or on premise. If you were to get a number of data requests in a short time period would your current data process, be able to handle it?

2. Risk Limitation
The less data you have, the less risk you have in committing a data breach as once you obtain data, you are responsible for it. With email and files being sent multiple times a day, it is vital to understand and comply with the correct regulations.Under regulations it is necessary to restrict access to personal data with robust privacy policies if it is not needed for a legitimate business purpose or if the data subject has not consented. A strategic approach to organising and managing your data minimisation will reduce the chance of any data breaches or leaks. Data minimisation is the main principle when it comes to data protection so don’t collect data you don’t need.

3. Reduce Costs
Data minimisation can save your company not only time but money too. By cutting down your data to what is important will inevitably cut your costs as there will be less storage taken up. You can consistently reduce the amount you spend on data archiving and security when you regularly review your data to see what is no longer appropriate to keep or redundant. There is no need for complex or costly add-ons, and you will reduce backup times and costs by assigning the right license to the right users. Although research showed last year that data subject access requests were costing businesses millions each year there are email and file archiving practices that you can apply to protect your organisation and minimise any potential data breaches.

Key questions to ask when it comes to Data Minimisation
1. How am I planning on using this information?
2. How long will I need the data?
3. Have I stored the very minimum of data needed?
4. Who can access this data?
5. Do I regularly review stored data and delete any I do not need?

Data privacy is a concern for organisations all around the world and our experts at Waterford Technologies can help you with your data minimisation strategy with help every step of the way thanks to their 20 years’ experience allowing you to utilise the best of our solutions to easily manage Email and File management, retention, eDiscovery, reporting, analysis, archiving, and global regulations.