Declaring your GDPR compliance status can be helpful whether you operate within the European Economic Area (EEA) or not. That way, your customers, clients, and business partners can all know of your in-house data privacy policy.
To simplify compliance for SaaS companies, it’s best to keep an up-to-date GDPR compliance checklist for your services at all times. That way, you can keep up with any regulation changes and avoid penalties.
What Is Required for GDPR Compliance?
Despite being a rather straightforward regulation for user data privacy, a lot goes into GDPR compliance requirements. To become a GDPR-certified business, you’re required to prove compliance in four ways:
- Legality and transparency: As a business, you need to thoroughly understand and justify the type of user data you’re collecting and keep track of which partners or employees may have access to it.
- Data security: In addition to data privacy, you’re also required to take reasonable action toward maintaining data security and integrity during processing, storage, and in-transit processes.
- Governance and accountability: Designate at least one individual in your company who is accountable for the company’s GDPR compliance. You’re also responsible for any violations committed by third-party partners, as they must sign a binding data processing agreement before any data is handed over.
- Customer rights: You should make it easy for customers to opt out of unnecessary data harvesting that isn’t critical to your services or products. Additionally, users should be able to correct, update, or delete their data from company servers upon formal request.
What Are the 7 GDPR Requirements?
GDPR compliance certification requires you to pass regular GDPR audits, also known as GDPR diagnosis or coaching. But what are the seven GDPR requirements for certification?
- Lawfulness, fairness, and transparency: The concepts of lawfulness and fairness are near-synonymous in the GDPR. You also need to maintain transparency with both users and government officials at all times, providing credible information about your data processing.
- Purpose limitation: You need to limit and explicitly specify the purpose of collecting and processing any type of user data beyond legitimate and necessary uses.
- Data minimization: Only request user data that are absolutely necessary for offering them the service or product they request. It’s important to avoid unnecessarily personal information such as phone number and home address.
- Accuracy: You must allow users to readily correct, update, or add to incomplete data upon request. This ensures the data you have is as accurate as possible.
- Storage limitation: You’re not allowed to keep data in storage beyond its use. You need to justify your set period of data retention. Afterward, you’re required to anonymize or erase any user data that is not actively in use.
- Integrity and confidentiality: You’re fully responsible for the safety, privacy, and integrity of all data you collect from users. The GDPR requires you to prove you’ve taken the necessary measures to protect it from unauthorized access, damages, or accidental loss.
- Accountability: You need to prove to the audit committee that you’ll be taking full accountability for any mishaps or violations of the GDPR. At least one person in your company must be contactable by relevant authorities in case of a violation.
How Do I Document GDPR Compliance?
Unlike other data security and privacy frameworks, GDPR can be self-declared. You can either perform all the necessary changes internally or work with an expert compliance advisor who can guide you through the needed changes.
Depending on the size of your company, implementing and verifying the changes necessary for compliance might take anywhere from a couple of weeks for smaller businesses to multiple months for corporations with thousands of employees.
While it’s not necessary, you can also choose to work with an approved accreditation body for your GDPR certification. Most certifications of this sort are valid for a period of three years. After that, you can renew it indefinitely as long as you continue to meet the latest GDPR requirements.
How Do I Create a GDPR Compliance Program?
Moving forward, your best course of action when developing a new piece of software is to build it with GDPR compliance in mind. That way, you won’t have to worry about implementing time-consuming and costly changes down the line.
A general GDPR compliance checklist for software development includes the following:
- Storage and communication encryption
- Thorough software documentation
- Built-in security alerts
- User data non-reliance
- Add a cookie banner
- Conduct a detailed gap analysis
- Access privileges control
What’s the First Step Towards GDPR Certification?
Before you get involved in the lengthy and costly process of getting GDPR certified, you should talk to an expert compliance advisor. At Trava Security, we can walk you through the steps needed to ensure your business is GDPR compliant.
Learn more about demonstrating your GDPR compliance with the help of our expert compliance advisors at Trava Security!