With GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) by the EU legislation in effect (May 25, 2018) it is essential for businesses both within the EU and overseas to re-look at their systems for collecting and using personal Data of their customers.
The objective of the law is to give more rights to EU residents with regards to how their personal information is being collected, stored and used. EU residents now have the right to request the organisations to stop using their personal data, return the data or delete it.
How GDPR affects Email
With email being the primary source for communication for businesses, it is an essential first step to find ways to make sure that the information contained within these emails is protected to comply with the new GDPR laws.
By their very nature emails contain a high level of personal information. This personal information can include anything that is related to an identifiable individual including email addresses, names, phone numbers, and IP addresses.
Email remains a central point of attack for phishing, ransomware and malware, putting the companies at a high risk of data breach. In addition to safeguarding email, it is essential for companies to maintain an easily accessible backup or archive for quick retrieval of any personal information.
Companies storing backup on tapes and drives could be at a higher risk as according to GDPR, individuals could potentially ask for a callback of all tapes and drives in order to erase all their information.
Mithi is committed to help you stay compliant with GDPR across all its products:
ClrStream – Email Security & Business Continuity
Our tie-up with Trend Micro assures that inbound and outbound mail is spam, virus and malware free. Advanced security features such as strict mail policies and access controls etc, helps monitor the incoming and outgoing mail. A built-in disaster recovery system ensures business continuity when the primary mail system is down, allowing your organization to respond to subject access requests rapidly.
SkyConnect – Secure, Dependable, Business Email Platform
Our Email Solution Mithi SkyConnect, offers a secure and reliable way to send and receive mail. In addition, all mail traffic to and from the Mithi SkyConnect service is encrypted in transit, which prevents eavesdropping or tampering. The solution is designed to withstand major disasters at the cloud layer, providing a disaster recovery mechanism with an SLA backed uptime guarantee of 99.9%, ensuring that personal data in email is always accessible on demand and requests to transfer or delete personal data in email can be handled rapidly.
Vaultastic – Secure Email Archiving
Our email archiving service, Vaultastic, helps ensure that a backup of all email data is always and readily available. Taking place in real time, the solution ensures that no mail is lost. All mail is stored in a tamper-proof vault that is free from accidental or malicious deletion of mail.
Fast, powerful ediscovery helps in retrieving lost mail or process subject access requests in a short span of time. The solution works with all popular email platforms whether on-premise or on cloud, such as Office 365, G Suite, Zimbra, MS Exchange etc.
Role-based administration and ediscovery access policies ensure that various departments only get access to the information they need to see.
Architecture to support compliance
All our solutions are cloud-based, making it faster to search for and respond to an individual’s access and possible deletion request. They come with SLA backed warranties and are hosted on the AWS Cloud whose services are GDPR ready.
All your data being on a separate operational infrastructure, guarantees that no mail is lost, in case of downtime or a system failure on your primary mail platform. All services are fully integrated, making setup, management and enforcement simpler and faster. Having access to an always-on archive platform ensures that your users can continue using the archive in the interim period, during a primary mail system downtime, to get on with their work.
Conclusion
The new legislation by the EU, could be a major trigger to organisations to get their act together on how they collect, store and process personal information.
Your organization runs a significant risk of reputation & financial loss if the personal data in email is not properly handled.
Mithi’s robust cloud-based, secure, SLA backed services, each of which has specific features to support the stringent requirements of GDPR, can form a significant part of your GDPR compliance strategy.