Data Mapping
Charting your data's journey through regulatory requirements & key privacy fundamentals
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Data mapping is a process that involves identifying, categorizing, and documenting the flow and characteristics of data within your organization. It drives you to understand what data you have, how you process it, what privacy risk you are taking on. It is an essential step becoming a Privacy Driven Organisation, providing clarity to make decisions about your data.
Addressing compliance requirements
Data privacy regulations worldwide demand certain data mapping components and expect you to have them in place. There are a number of ways to address these requirements and to ensure that, while you comply with the applicable regulations, your data mapping delivers value company-wide.
Data
Discovery
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Our Data Discovery service is more than locating data—it's about uncovering insights and ensuring compliance. We leverage best practices and AI to locate, classify, and analyze data, empowering efficient data management and compliance.
Records of Processing
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We assist you in documenting and maintaining a clear record of data processing activities. This foundation ensures compliance with regulations like the GDPR and demonstrates your commitment to data protection.
Privacy Impact Assessments
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Our Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs) and Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs) proactively identify and mitigate privacy risks, enabling you to make informed decisions in alignment with data privacy regulations.
Data Discovery
Unlocking visibility & actionable insights through
In the age of datafication, the absence of a robust and consistent data governance structure can quickly lead to the formation of a data swamp. We provide support in turning data swamps into data lakes and extracting their full value through the process of data discovery.
Visibility and control over data are necessary not only for compliance with data protection regulations, but also to extract value from it. However, without an effective governance structure from the outset of the process, it is nearly impossible to manage the amounts of data that datafication produces, from multiple collection points, in various formats, in several locations. This can result in a data swamp (where all data is held in a pool without any organisation, metadata, or lifecycle management) or even a situation where the company don’t know where their data are held at all. Neither allows the company to leverage the full value of their data, and both are at odds with data protection principles, such as storage limitation, data minimisation, and purpose limitation.
Our approach to undertaking
data discovery
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Tailored
options
We offer several options for data discovery, depending on the needs of our client. The solution is tailored based on collection methods, the types of data collected, and the current state of the processing records.
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Manual data discovery relies on interviews with stakeholders to determine the data flows within the company. It is the option we suggest for companies who are not fully confident in the accuracy or robustness of their Records of Processing Activity to date.
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Accelerated data discovery utilises existing ROPAs to facilitate and expedite the process.
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Automated data discovery utilises software solutions selected to best address the client’s needs. It can also lay the groundwork for implementing the chosen software solution for further data governance and processing management.
Data flow
maps
To visualise data channels and locations within a company, from collection through storage to erasure, we design data flow maps. They improve data processing visibility and facilitate GDPR art. 30 compliance.
Accessible
data trends
We analyse the data flow maps and summarise the data in succinct and readable format to offer insight into the business. This form of presentation is more legible than an extensive spreadsheet and makes insights derived from the data accessible to more stakeholders across the company.
Governance
guidance
We prepare guidance and deliver trainings on best data governance practices, to ensure future organisation and usability of the data.
Reporting & third party management facilitate transparency by delineating a clear lineage of where the data is going and what protectionary measures are in place
Third Party Management
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Organisations continue to rapidly expand their third-party networks due to the clear benefits in success. This dependency however causes risk. From a data privacy perspective, the use of third parties is not only about data protection but fraud prevention, security and compliance thus strong due diligence is necessary.
Approaches to dealing with third-party risk generally fail to toe the line between assessing privacy risk and ensuring the continuation of business operation in a rapidly evolving market. We can help you proactively manage third party risk by outlining a clear procedure at the outset.
Through the use of our tailored vendor assessments, vendor management can be integrated into your day-to-day. We have had ample experience tailoring third party management holistically across every department to ensure your top-level management have a full unsegmented picture.
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With the use of software, these vendor assessments are automatically reviewed with the counterparty and can be closed across a quick timeframe. This will mitigate the risk of a trade-off between privacy risk and the continuity of business operations.