The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has fundamentally reshaped how organizations manage and protect personal data. Enforced nearly a decade ago, GDPR remains the most significant data privacy reform in the past 20 years and continues to set the standard for global data governance, especially as organizations expand digital operations across cloud platforms, enterprise applications, and cross-border ecosystems.
Organizations that capture, process, or control the personal data of individuals residing in the European Union (EU) must comply with GDPR. Non-compliance can result in severe consequences, including fines of up to 4% of annual global turnover or €20 million, whichever is greater, reputational damage, and private claims from affected individuals.
The regulation empowers EU residents, both citizens and non-citizens, to determine whether, when, how, and to whom their personal data is disclosed and used. It also provides enhanced protection for special categories of personal data, including racial or ethnic origin, religion, political beliefs, genetic, biometric, or health information, sexual orientation, and more.
To meet all the requirements specified in the regulation (including data subjects’ expanded rights), IT, Security, and Compliance leaders must be able to:
- Identify and classify all sources of personal data within the organization and maintain visibility into where that data resides at all times
- Control access to personal data, ensuring that only authorized individuals are able to view or perform actions on it.
- Document compliance with the GDPR, maintaining an audit trail of how, when, and where personal data is accessed or used — both within and outside the organization.
Meeting these requirements requires a system that can automate policy enforcement to reduce the risk of user error. The solution must also ensure that user and data attributes remain accurate and up to date without human intervention.
To adequately protect personally identifiable information (PII), security must extend directly to the data itself. Protection must remain consistent even as data is shared across the extended enterprise, including customers, partners, service providers, and users, and across different devices and environments.
NextLabs has these capabilities built into its platform, data protection, and application security solutions. Out of the box, NextLabs offers the “data protection by design and by default” required by Article 25 of the GDPR.
How NextLabs Ensures GDPR Compliance
Simply putting data security tools and processes in place does not guarantee GDPR-level protection of sensitive data. NextLabs helps organizations achieve full GDPR compliance with automated, integrated, and pervasive protection of PII:
- GDPR policies are created and managed in a single platform and enforced consistently and automatically across the organization, giving full visibility into what is protected
- Protection of PII is pervasive, no matter where the data resides: cloud, laptops, mobile devices, or file servers. Data protection is persistent throughout the lifecycle regardless of where it goes.
- Policies are easily amended or updated and the system automatically enforces the new policies across the extended enterprise.
- Access decisions adjust automatically as people’s roles or status change, so the most current information is always used
- Centralized visibility and reporting provide a real-time view of data access and usage, regardless of where the data goes.
Discover More
Learn how NextLabs addresses the GDPR challenges outlined above by automating compliance and enforcing security policies that protect and control access to PII while preventing data misuse and security violations.
