The Impact of GDPR on IT Asset Management

In case you missed it, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), went into effect on May 25, 2018. You should care about it and address it, accordingly, starting now (if you haven’t already).

The good news is that your IT Asset Management (ITAM) efforts can ease and speed GDPR compliance. Even better, those compliance efforts can result in additional business benefits as well.

Regulators in the European Union (EU) designed GDPR with one goal: to protect the personally identifiable information (PII) of EU citizens wherever they may be.

This means if EU citizens are customers, employees, and partners of your business, or you serve or interact with them in any other way, your business must comply with GDPR, regardless of where your business is headquartered.

Your business must credibly demonstrate compliance whenever regulators require it. Each GDPR violation can cost as much as four percent of your business’ annual revenues worldwide, or 20 million Euros, whichever is more. Countries outside the EU are beginning to contemplate similar regulations. All good reasons to improve control of your customers’ and users’ PII ASAP.

Your business must achieve and maintain complete GDPR compliance. Even more urgently, it must also avoid potential costs, financial and otherwise, of non-compliance matters.

Perhaps, in response to the prospect of those costs, some U.S. news sites blocked access from the EU immediately after GDPR came into effect.

To achieve its GDPR goals, your IT team needs accurate, complete, and timely information about your entire IT environment. That information must include external connections to partners, customers, and other stakeholders. All the relationships and interdependencies that connect your IT environment elements, applications, information, and users.

Your IT team needs this information to identify every point in your environment at which your business does or might interact with any EU citizen’s personally identifiable information . Every such point your IT team misses is a potential GDPR violation.

ITAM: A Helpful Prerequisite for GDPR

You need comprehensive IT Asset Management (ITAM) that includes automated IT discovery, asset correlation, and relationship and dependency mapping. This will empower you and your team to have a complete view of your environment as well as the business’ interactions with EU citizens and their PII.

Every company is different, and determining what your business must do for GDPR compliance can be difficult.

ITAM can help by providing you with the tools, data and insights you will need to ensure compliance. The right ITAM solution can also help improve the overall quality and security of all of customer and user information.

(See, Effective Inventory Management: Your Best Defense Against Your Next IT Audit)

Relationship with Partners and Service Providers

Beyond IT assets, you and your team must learn how business partners and IT service providers are addressing GDPR, and make sure they keep you informed. Many modern companies rely on partners and service providers to support their business operations.

If yours is such a company, then you may need to collaborate with partners and service providers to ensure end-to-end compliance for customers and users. You and your team must also establish processes to continuously obtain the most current information you need to maintain and demonstrate continued GDPR compliance.

The Benefits of Precise Data

The challenges are daunting, but the benefits are great. With more accurate, complete and timely information about your IT environment and the information within it, your business can do more than avoid non-compliance penalties. With more insightful information, your business may be able to reduce IT operational or support costs, or even identify new business opportunities.

IT Discovery and IT Asset Management Tools from Virima can help your business achieve and maintain demonstrable compliance. They can capture and inventory data about your IT environment’s components automatically.

They can map dependencies, visualize relationships and provide accurate, complete and timely information about your environment. These benefits extend beyond GDPR compliance.

They can help make your environment more stable, secure, responsive and valuable to your business. Learn more about Virima’s solutions for Discovery, ITAM and ITSM here.

Virima is here to help. To get started, contact us today to schedule a demo and explore the possibilities!