Let’s face it; privacy can be a pain for businesses. It can feel like a burden on your company’s time and resources, and be overwhelming to manage with mountains of governmental oversight and regulation to navigate. As the digital age continues forward, it has become more and more obvious that these are not just growing pains that will simply go away. If you own or manage a small to medium sized business, this fact is likely something that has more than just crossed your mind over recent years as you continued to grow. You may be asking yourself; “Am I prepared to handle this data?”, “What kind of risks am I currently accepting?”, “How do I know if my business is handling compliance in a proper way?”.
Enter the Chief Privacy Officer or CPO. The CPO role is designed to answer all these questions, as well as alleviate the burden of data privacy and security compliance. This includes an ever-growing list of international and domestic privacy regulations such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), CPRA (California Privacy Rights Act), CPPA (Canadian Consumer Privacy Protection Act), VCDPA (Virginia Consumer Data Privacy Act). A CPO possesses the expertise to build and guide a business through these arduous security and privacy processes. This encompasses simpler things such as a privacy policy, all the way to the not-so-simple things like international consumer data laws and security compliance for the company’s entire network and data infrastructure.
As you might imagine, a role like this is not filled easily, nor cheaply. CPO’s often have decades of experience with paychecks to match, and are in increasingly high demand with the exponential growth of digital and international market spaces. So how is a small to medium business expected to acquire one? Can your business support another C-level paycheck? How about another big, expensive office space? What about supporting staff and equipment? You can see how quickly hiring and implementing a CPO can become a struggle in its own right, especially when you may already be stretched thin in a period of rapid growth, ie, when you might need one the most. Well, there’s a solution for that as well.
Modern problems require modern solutions, which is exactly what a vCPO, or virtual Chief Privacy Officer is meant to be. A vCPO, sometimes referred to as CPO-as-a-Service, can offer experience, knowledge, and expertise in the data privacy and security field that so many quickly growing businesses need, without the daunting costs, resource drain, and complexity associated with building what amounts to an entire new division of the company. The vCPO can offer any and all solutions a traditional CPO can. This includes understanding and implementing both international and domestic privacy regulations, company data ethics and practices such as handling PII (Personally Identifiable Information), as well as incident response planning and documentation. So what allows a vCPO to do all this and still save money? The answer is scalability. A vCPO solution can grow, shrink, and customize itself to the exact needs and challenges of your business as it stands, and as it changes. It brings its own support and resources to you in a neat and tidy package, giving you the ability to focus on growth, and getting privacy and security out the way!
If you feel have additional questions or need a virtual Chief Privacy Officer, contact CyberData Pros and we can help. Let us help put together a plan and keep your business in full compliance.