Priorities IT pros follow to ensure ingrained privacy and compliance

Products that help businesses discover and map data flows top the list of purchase plans and the privacy team is playing a larger role in privacy tech purchasing decisions as organizations navigate a complex field of regulations, according to TrustArc and International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP).

“As the number of privacy regulations grows, organizations must contend with the complexity of managing an increasingly fragmented privacy regulatory landscape,” said Chris Babel, CEO, TrustArc.

“These rapid regulatory changes make cross-regulation management more difficult. As a result, organizational leaders are purchasing technology that can streamline the process of building global privacy compliance at scale, while turning more to privacy and data protection professionals for purchase input.”

The increasing complexity of business in the digital world, coupled with a growing list of global privacy frameworks, has increased the need for organizations to adopt solutions that demonstrate compliance and are scalable and efficient. With the entry of GDPR last year, privacy technology solutions were pushed into prime time.

Not only do privacy professionals need tools to organize and record data mapping and inventory exercises, as well as systems for conducting privacy impact assessments, they also increasingly require support with consent management, cookie compliance and data subject access requests (DSAR). The latter is becoming increasingly critical with the impending implementation of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Key findings

Data mapping, data discovery, assessment management, and individual rights are top growing privacy tool categories:

• The top purchase plans for the next twelve months include Data Mapping / Flow (24%), Data Discovery (23%), Assessment Management (20%) and DSAR / Individual Rights (18%).
• Compared to last year’s survey, demand for Privacy Legal Updates and Information Management solutions has grown by 5%.
• Survey results showed similar privacy tech-purchasing habits among companies, regardless of size or whether in highly regulated (e.g., financial and health) or non-regulated industries.

Privacy department plays large role in purchase process:

• Privacy teams are the leading decision input for 9 of the 11 tool categories; The top four include Program Assessments (37%), Legal Updates (36%), Data Mapping (31%), and Individual Rights (31%).
• Privacy teams are the top budget sources for Privacy Assessment (51%), Privacy Legal Updates (45%), Individual Rights (41%), Data Mapping (35%), and Data Subject Consent (34%) tools.