Privacy pros gaining control of technology decision-making over IT

TrustArc and IAPP announced the results of new research that examined how privacy technology is bought and deployed to address privacy and data protection challenges. Surveying privacy professionals worldwide, the findings of the survey show that privacy management technology usage is on the rise across all regions and that privacy teams have significant influence on purchasing decisions for eight of the ten technology categories surveyed.

“This global survey is critical in our efforts to better understand how privacy professionals are addressing compliance challenges and the technologies that are being deployed now and in the near future,” said Chris Babel, CEO of TrustArc. “Though security budgets remain larger, we’re seeing a marked shift in privacy teams’ influence over technology purchasing decisions. This trend confirms what we’re seeing among our customers – that they have a growing need for technology solutions to help them manage privacy compliance at scale on a global basis.”

The EU GDPR and other global and domestic legal reforms, combined with technological advancements, have made the task of operationalizing privacy and data protection vastly more complicated. Businesses now must account for how data is entering the organization, how it is being used, what permissions are attached to it and who has the responsibility for managing it. To address these challenges, the demand for privacy technology continues to grow rapidly.

“As the head of an organization that hosts privacy and data protection conferences around the globe, I’m able to intensively track the trends and challenges of privacy professionals,” said Trevor Hughes, CEO and President of the IAPP. “The findings from this survey give us a better understanding of how companies are operationalizing privacy and how as an industry we can best support them.”

To understand the different types of privacy and security technologies that are being used – and by whom, TrustArc and the IAPP surveyed more than 300 privacy professionals in the U.S., EU, UK and Canada.

Key findings from the survey include:

Privacy tech adoption approaching the tipping point

While only two technology product categories currently have > 50% market adoption, it is projected to increase to eight of the ten categories based on purchase plans.

Data mapping, assessment management, and data discovery among fastest growing solutions

• 24% have already purchased Data Mapping and Flow technologies and 21% have purchased Personal Data Discovery tools. These two technologies also top the chart for what organizations are planning to implement at 33%.
• Privacy Program Assessment and Management software has made significant headway, with 33% of organizations surveyed having purchased it or implemented it and another 32% either planning to purchase this technology in the future or have already purchased it but have yet to implement.

Privacy has a strong influence on purchase decisions across most product categories

• While IT and infosec control the budgets for a number of technologies, privacy has influence and provides significant input on eight of the ten categories of technology surveyed, including Privacy Program Assessment, Consent Management and Data Mapping.
• For incident response, 69% said privacy had input into the decision-making, even more so than the IT team, despite only 28% of privacy teams actually having budget authority.