The EU General Data Protection Regulation is staring everyone in the face. The countdown to implementation day is now in the single digits, and everyone is currently waiting to see what happens when May 25 comes and goes. While organizations around the world prepare for the rules, a pair of major players have joined forces to help those worried about not only complying with the GDPR but everything beyond it, as well.
TrustArc and RADAR have announced a strategic partnership aimed at simplifying compliance efforts by integrating their products and doing work cross-licensing and providing consulting services.
This is not a partnership that popped up overnight. TrustArc CEO Chris Babel noticed a lot of companies began focusing on breach requirements under the GDPR, even if they should have been doing so much earlier.
“As we looked at customers who are struggling to piece all of these things together, what we see them looking for again and again are best-in-breed solutions that really solve their problems,” Babel said. “As we looked at the space and started to get to know RADAR from conversations and IAPP events, it was clear that they were the market leader in solving this in a comprehensive way for companies.”
RADAR CEO Mahmood Sher-Jan found partnering with TrustArc was a logical choice given the continued growth of the privacy industry.
“The few of us vendors who have been at this for a long time, those commitments are very genuine, and we have so much invested in bringing technology and innovation to space that has for a long time been somewhat neglected with technology,” Sher-Jan said. “That commitment and that depth of experience, and deep privacy expertise that TrustArc brings is very appealing to us.”
The first phase of the partnership started with the TrustArc and RADAR teams gaining a better understand of each other’s products, including using each other’s solutions in-house.
Babel, for instance, aims for his team to be able to either consult RADAR if they are asked a question about breach management or eventually be able to know enough about their partner’s products to answer the questions independently.
On the other side, Sher-Jan said learning from TrustArc could help RADAR build its consulting capabilities, and working with their products and service can help make that a reality.
From a product standpoint, the companies see existing clients benefiting from integrating their two products together.
“Once they start to put elements into our Data Flow Manager, metadata from there can flow through and help populate RADAR if they were a customer of ours so that it eases and simplifies the implementation of RADAR’s solution,” Babel said. “Likewise, information can get passed back through that system.”
Having data transfer back and forth between the two solutions can help create the comprehensive solution both companies hope to create, he said.
“Since their platform knows what assets those data elements are attached to, and what assets contain highly sensitive data, you could envision and identify which assets do have incidents associated with them, and that type of information could be extremely helpful to feed back to the dashboard so that clients know which assets are under attack or experiencing incidents, and the impact of that throughout the organization,” Sher-Jan said.
Not only did the two companies see their products as complementary, they also saw a cultural fit, as well. Both Sher-Jan and Babel praised the work and the teams of their partners, while also noting their similar approach to the privacy industry.
“We have a very similar approach to the market, which is for this to work; if you are a small business or the most complex business in the world, the reality is the rules are complex, and we both have a deep set of solutions that take complexity and make it simple for customers,” Babel said. “It’s never totally easy, because it’s a tough underlying challenge that people are trying to beat.”
Babel believes the partnership between TrustArc and RADAR is the sign of a larger trend that is about to begin. The TrustArc CEO said the privacy industry is only now starting to see a surge of tech dedicated to addressing the problems within the industry.
Babel believes the partnership between TrustArc and RADAR is the sign of a larger trend that is about to begin. The TrustArc CEO said the privacy industry is only now starting to see a surge of tech dedicated to addressing the problems within the industry.
“I think you've seen a really quick shift in that space and a realization in the market that technology is not just nice to have, or for someone who has a lot of data management challenges, but really for everyone,” Babel said.
As for their immediate partnership, the two companies are hoping to provide the most comprehensive solution to help organizations around the world tackle that important four-letter rule.
“In no privacy framework discussion can you ignore incident preparedness and incident response, because if you leave that out, you have a gap,” Sher-Jan said. “This is where the relationship that we are putting in place addresses comprehensively all of the preparation work, policy development and data tracking to ensure compliance with myriad aspects of the GDPR. We begin where TrustArc ends, and plugging the two of us together creates a comprehensive, end-to-end, life cycle management for data privacy.”
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