A recent survey conducted by Cisco revealed that India is placed at sixth position in global GDPR readiness with countries like Spain, Mexico and Argentina. The study provides the strong evidence that organizations are benefitting from their data privacy investments beyond compliance.    

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which focused on protection for EU residents’ privacy and personal data, became enforceable on May 25, 2018. Most of the organizations worldwide are working steadily towards getting ready for GDPR. Among all the respondents in the Data privacy benchmark study, 59% indicated that they are meeting most of GDPR’s requirements, 29% indicated that they are expecting to be GDPR ready within a year.     

“At Cisco, we absolutely believe in both protecting our customers and driving business success by maximizing the value of data and minimizing risk,” said Michelle Dennedy, Chief Privacy Officer, Cisco.      

Organizations are concerned about the products and services that they deploy provide appropriate privacy protection. Sales delay due to customer data privacy concerns continues to be an issue for most of the organizations; 87% reported that they have delays in selling to existing customers. Those organizations that invested in data privacy to meet GDPR experienced shorter delays in selling to existing customers, which is significantly up from last year. While a majority of companies reported having a data breach in the last year, a lower percentage of about 74% of the GDPR ready companies were impacted and had shorter downtimes, it is not surprising that the GDPR ready companies experienced lower overall costs associated with data breaches.   

“India has greatly improved upon its GDPR readiness with its fast evolving data privacy ecosystem, which is because of a collaborative approach by the government and private organizations. However, there remains a huge scope for Indian organizations to increase their investments in people, and technology controls to meet customer privacy requirements faster,” said Vishak Raman, Director, Cisco.

This study has quantified a number of business benefits connected to privacy maturity. More than 3,200 global security and privacy professionals in 18 countries across major industries responded to the Cisco survey about their organizations’ privacy practices. In future, the Cisco shall explore the benefits over the change in time, especially as privacy regulations and customer expectations continue to evolve in different industries and different geographies. Cisco will continue to work in the privacy field to provide information for better investment decision-making and improved trust with the customers.