When the IAPP released the first "
The inaugural report had 51 entries, a sign that the privacy tech market was still very much in its infancy. Fast forward to 2020: The narrative has changed, and the latest version of the report is a reflection of the market's noticeable incline in the last year. With this latest 2020 update, there are now 304 privacy tech vendors.
Since it was last published in 2019, 50 new tech vendors submitted themselves to be included in the report. These vendors came from all over the globe. Of the existing categories, data mapping and privacy information managers saw the largest increases, with 26 and 25 new vendors, respectively.
As a response to the market, the most notable addition to this year's report is the inclusion of the data subject request category.
DSRs have continued to be a compliance challenge for organizations subject to the GDPR and CCPA. As companies have searched for the best methods to fulfill these inquiries, vendors have responded by producing solutions to help facilitate the request workload. As a result, the IAPP received 49 submissions for this new category, a sign of the growing demand for DSR solutions.
The new report also highlights the significant rounds of investments companies received over the last year.
Based on the increased number of privacy tech vendors in the last three years, noteworthy influx of capital investment and continued advancement of privacy legislation around the world, conventional wisdom would have suggested the privacy tech market was primed for a continued upward trajectory.
But we do not live in a conventional time.
The COVID-19 pandemic has turned the entire world upside-down, and this complete upheaval has left everything in a state of uncertainty. To say the world's economy is unstable may be a massive understatement.
It goes without saying that the privacy tech market will almost certainly be impacted by the pandemic. It would be naive to say it wouldn't. The IAPP plans to release its next version of the "Privacy Tech Vendor Report" sometime in the second half of 2020. As we are likely still in the early days of the pandemic, it is impossible to say what we will see when the IAPP opens submissions for inclusion down the line.
Will we see fewer new vendors than we did now? Will there be fewer vendors in the report overall? Similar to every other aspect of life right now, we will have to be patient and wait to see what happens next.
Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash
