Why Data Compliance Is So Important For Toronto Businesses

Every business collects data today to have a competitive edge.

However, compliance requirements regulate how your business gathers, analyzes, and secures the data you collect.

Data compliance ensures businesses implement procedures, policies, workflows, and operations that meet the obligations of the Canadian data protection laws. After all, data is a fluid entity and requires constant time and attention to ensure your business is handling them correctly.

Beyond avoiding fines and appeasing auditors, there are plenty of reasons why your business should remain compliant, but we want to focus on only the most essential benefits. Let’s start with the first one.

1. Data Compliance Fosters Customer Loyalty

Customers are demonstrating a willingness to pay another business more for the same services if it shows commitment to privacy. People are more concerned about sharing their data with businesses, with a high percentage believing that organizations must be more proactive about protecting their sensitive information.

No customer wants to deal with a company with data protection issues. Having compliance issues is a huge warning sign to buyers.

Remaining data compliant fights the increasing skepticism and mistrust around data privacy. Even though customers are more aware of how businesses use their personal data to grow, they are more comfortable sharing their sensitive information with a compliant company.

What’s more, with the rising cases of hacking scandals, customers need assurance that your cybersecurity solutions meet compliance standards and hackers won’t expose their sensitive data.

Meeting compliance standards shows customers that your business is less likely to suffer from a data breach, and you won’t misuse their sensitive data.

2. Compliance Improves Your Business Image

People want to work with businesses that demonstrate high priority on data protection. Compliance shows the world that your business follows data ethics in:

Collection
Processing
Storage
Usage

Data compliance shows the world that you have clear intentions in collecting and using personal data.

More importantly, compliance shows the outside world that your business is resilient to data breaches. People tend to avoid businesses that have suffered a data breach.

According to the ICSPA survey, 80% of Canadian customers will avoid a company that was compromised before. 52% of the customers will opt to get the same services from a company with better services.

The impact of a data breach is more than loss of data or potential losses. It extends to customer loyalty and brand reputation. Your business’ backup solutions, data loss prevention, and basic cybersecurity measures should remain compliant to boost your business’s reputation.

3. Keeps Your Business Compliant With Regulations

Your business must meet compliance standards.

Failing to comply with the set data compliance regulations can be costly. When regulators and auditors investigate your organization, and you fail to explain how they ensure data safety for its users, you’ll incur a heavy penalty.

Canada has new legislation to reshape the nation’s framework.

According to the new laws, failure to remain compliant can cost a business up to 5% of annual global turnover or a $25 million penalty. The penalties can cause hiccups in business operations or make it declare bankruptcy.

While every company aims at making profits and outdoing the competition, data protection is an area that can make everything fall into dust. Compliance is essential while trying to save on costs.

Which Are the Most Common Data Protection Regulations and Standards?

Data protection regulations provide the bare minimum standards a business has to meet for data security. Data compliance helps in the protection of data.

Here are the most common data regulatory standards.

GDPR
PIPEDA
PCI-DSS
Sarbanes-Oxley
CASL

View an extensive list here.

How Do You Achieve Data Compliance?

Data compliance is easy to achieve if you follow a structured flow of practices. Let’s look at the principles you can follow to achieve compliance.

1. Identify Personal Data That Needs Compliance: Your first step is to identify data that regulators categorize as private. The steps will entail tracking of:

The flow of personal information across and through applications
Storage of personal information
Who you share private information with

2. Secure Personal Data: Many companies worry about their central databases and forget to secure small databases like access and flat files. Assuming access and flat files makes it easy for attackers to exploit areas with low security. You can involve third parties in data protection to ensure nothing is left to chance. A single misconfiguration is enough for a cyber attack and a data breach.

3. Develop a System to Answer People’s Requests for Personal Data and Usage: Your system should be able to gather information across your organization and customer service application. You should be able to produce the information you keep about a customer whenever they ask for it.

4. Create a Mechanism for Retrieving Personal Data Reports: The regulatory laws also require your business to be able to produce a copy of all data you’ve obtained about an individual. Your data collection system should also be able to produce a copy of the data request to the owner.

5. Developing a Compliant Process for Deleting Data: The data owner has the right to have their data deleted, or their identity changed when they please. The organization has to take care of the process not to delete data that affirms compliance with the law and regulations.

Tektonic will Help Your Business Secure Data and Remain Compliant

Data compliance is barely a minimum requirement that regulatory bodies layout to try to secure data. You shouldn’t confuse compliance with completely developed security.

You’d miss it all if you assume meeting minimum compliance requirements is all you need — especially with the constant stresses hackers, foreign governments, and terrorists put on systems and networks.

Our specialists at Tektonic will do all the patchwork for you, including:

Provide you with data protection and backup services that ensure you never lose your data
Secure your network and system so that attackers cannot access sensitive data that your company has
Ensure you meet the mere minimum requirement laid out by the Canadian government and industry regulatory bodies

We understand all the compliance requirements, and we want to help your business meet the regulatory standards. For more information on our IT services in Toronto, contact us today.