Working for a global software company, the compliance team at AvePoint has an opportunity to work with privacy officers, CISOs and CIOs around the world and across many industries. Many of our customers believe that their compliance challenges are specific to their company, and subsequently have very little opportunity to collaborate with peers within their own companies—much less opportunities to collaborate with peers within or across industries. With these isolated and limited views into best practices outside of the day-to-day world in which they operate, we believe that the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) provides a great opportunity to help guide them toward a “best practices” approach to compliance based on our global efforts. We are really thrilled to join forces with the IAPP to bring automation to one of the fundamental tenets of a good privacy program—the Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) process—with the new AvePoint Privacy Impact Assessment (APIA) solution. APIA assists customers in developing a programmatic approach to Privacy by Design. The solution allows privacy teams to develop a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with their colleagues in IT and the business. Rather than the cumbersome manuals often utilized when carrying out PIAs, APIA provides a system to implement a standardized and repeatable process with your colleagues in IT and the business to come to you as a project “begins” rather than when it is waiting for your sign off to go “live.”  This means your team can provide advice, guidance and thoroughly review every step of the process. Consider using APIA to allow your colleagues to request a PIA of the systems they are planning to build and deploy so you can provide them with a reasonable estimate and timeline. Your involvement early on will save them from having to make last-minute design changes or decisions with the clock to launch ticking. APIA is an automated software solution that can be downloaded and run inside of your company’s firewall to automate the process of evaluating, assessing, and reporting on the privacy implications of their enterprise IT systems. APIA is distributed exclusively by IAPP to members at no extra cost and supported by AvePoint for the global privacy community. IAPP and AvePoint have also made available a helpful community site to enable the privacy community to contribute questions about APIA and PIAs in general as well as share best practices. As any privacy officer knows, ensuring an organization’s data is sufficiently protected and in compliance with regulatory policies is an “all hands on deck” affair that can involve everyone from privacy to security to IT to the business. APIA brings all of these stakeholders together through innovative technology to become an important piece of your organization’s governance, risk and compliance program. For more information and to download APIA today, please visit the IAPP Resource Center.