Personal data protection – standards for companies

Taking proper care of general data security is one of the many requirements that any company should take into consideration when opening their service to clients. With personal data being put in their hands on a daily basis, either it’s in form of an email address that is submitted via their website, or actual personal data such as name and address written on a contract, companies are being trusted with keeping it safe and away from third parties. To make the process of ensuring that security easier, there are several regulations and standards that companies can and should abide by, two of the most important being RODO (GDPR) and ISO 27001. How data protection regulations fit into company standards and how to implement a cohesive information security management system compliant to the two aforementioned standards?

How to create a good security standards in your company

Having all sorts of rules, laws and regulations stating how your company should work with data security, it is hard to feel like there is any level of freedom you can have on that field. However, the fact is that companies not only can, but should have their own internal standards for managing information and personal data security and that is generally referred to as an ISMS. The system should be developed based on the laws you must abide by (such as RODO) as well as general international standards that help you achieve compliance with those laws and do even more for your data protection. Such standard would of course be the ISO 27001 norm, which goes into detail on how to create a cohesive ISMS.

What are the basic standards for personal data and information security?

First of all, data should be processed as confidential, meaning that no unauthorised third parties have a chance to access it at any given time. Second of all, a thing that has been widely discussed regarding RODO is the need of keeping only the most necessary and integral information, which basically means that all redundant data should be safely disposed of. As an example we could say that if a customer signs a deal but does not allow for contacting him for further offers, their data should not be kept against the persons will. Last, but definitely not least, data should be always accessible and able to be recovered in case of an accident, which by the way should be so predictable that they don’t even happen.