We are at 99 days and counting down to May 25th, when the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will begin to be enforced and only about 6% of U.S. enterprises are prepared to show compliance. The difficulty US companies are having is only to be expected, given that the regulatory environment in the United States is in many ways in direct contrast with that of the European Union. However, we believe that the GDPR being globally enforceable represents a positive opportunity to raise the standards of customer data management in the US companies. Mainly, it’s a push toward private, secure data governance policies that each company owns in-house rather than relying on third-party data management platforms.
Trusting third-party providers to manage your data always means giving up a couple of things that are fairly relevant for any business, such as customization and security. And while customization only compromises the level of insightfulness and freedom a business enjoys, data security compromises a much more complex and extensive range of features, exposing your company to liabilities over which you have no control.
Resorting to third-party hosted data management providers comprises a bunch of data security grey areas that range from not knowing whose privacy policy is being followed to being unaware of the extent to which your provider is co-mingling your data with others’ and using it to enhance your competitors’ targeting.
It may, therefore, be harmful to you in two ways: by damaging client relationship, since it might not comply with what customers believe they are signing up for, and by compromising your business strategy, since giving your biggest asset away to your competitors (no matter how disguised your data might get) is never a good policy.
But there is even more to it: giving away data control also means that avoiding data leakage is not under your control – and that is one thing you definitely want to keep under your control. If leakage does occur, it will not be supervised by you or your team: you will only be briefed as it happens. It puts your company at risk of steep fines from the EU if your company is found liable for exposing your customer data to data practices that are not GDPR compliant.
We at Velocidi have always believed that marketers should have absolute access and ownership of their data. That’s why we have developed iron-clad products that not only run under the client’s infrastructure, giving them complete control over their data, but also why we still offer a single instance for each business, avoiding the mixing of data from different clients.
With the GDPR enforcement date coming up, data ownership and privacy procedures are all of a sudden becoming a top priority for everyone. But it has ALWAYS been a top priority that we provide these things for our clients. Our customer data platform gives you a safe, GDPR-compliant environment where your data is completely under your control.
Your company may not have the time or resources to build a state-of-the-art private tech platform to get up to par with the new laws. But our team has spent the last several years building and fine-tuning one so you don’t have to.
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