How to Balance Speed and Safety When Protecting Privacy at Work

Compliance and security traditionally comes at the cost of usability – but new approaches are challenging the status quo.

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Almost every business has digitally transformed its operations as a result of the global pandemic, with different degrees of success. 

Some used digital transformation to improve workplace productivity and performance. Others focused on optimizing the customer experience. And others still radically upgraded their business’ value proposition in order to meet new demands.

However,  many  of these transformative initiatives had to be implemented quickly, with time only for passing  concern for the long-term ripple effects they might cause. Now that the post-pandemic economy is beginning to stabilize, business leaders are looking for what they might have missed amidst the rapid shift.

Digital transformation often leads to significant challenges balancing speed, safety, and privacy protection. Many of today’s businesses and enterprises face compliance challenges that originate from hastily made pandemic work policies.

The Era of Data Protection and Privacy is Here

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Data privacy has never been more relevant than it is today. Today’s hyper-connected digital workplace has created numerous opportunities for the exploitation of sensitive data, prompting a pressing need for regulation. Monitoring software for employees has a major role to play in this environment.

Business leaders and employees alike are increasingly aware of headline-making data breaches and cyberattacks. New privacy laws and regulations are putting organizations under pressure to change their tried-and-true work habits to accommodate the risks of non-compliance.

Some companies – and individuals within companies – may see data privacy regulation as unnecessary red tape. It’s a rigid set of rules that gets in the way of simply doing business as quickly and transparently as possible.

But if that business exposes sensitive information to unauthorized third parties, or uses customer data in a non-compliant way, the company will suffer. It’s not even because of regulatory fines, although they can be significant. Customers have repeatedly and overwhelmingly demonstrated their preference for privacy-oriented organizations.

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Practicing Privacy Doesn’t Have to Slow Business Down

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For a business that implemented remote work at the start of the pandemic and is now looking for ways to ensure data privacy compliance moving forward, the task may seem daunting. You already collect, store, and use personal data from employees and customers. How can you change the way things work without impacting business?

Leveraging emerging technologies is one of the best solutions for this problem. A new, tech-enabled approach to regulatory compliance is quickly gaining traction with business leaders and enterprise executives alike.

RegTech – as it is called – uses the software-as-a-service model to manage regulatory compliance without slowing down business. This reduces the amount of stress organizations put on their in-house IT teams while ensuring compliance goals are met. 

As a result, organizations free up valuable IT resources for achieving strategic goals. Solutions like employee task tracking software offset the burden of regulatory compliance and streamline their processes so that business runs faster, not slower.

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Using RegTech and Employee Management Software

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This approach is informed by multiple technologies working in tandem. RegTech solutions use software to meet the demands of specific industries. But compliance management is not purely a software issue. It’s a company-wide process that starts from four places:

• Onboarding - Security and privacy need to be part of the employee onboarding process from the very beginning. New employees need training in order to understand how your company views data privacy and security, and the role they play in ensuring compliance goals are met.
• Monitoring - In order to ensure compliance, you need a solution for monitoring employees in the workplace. This gives you the ability to generate valuable data about how employees interact with customer data and how they process data during their daily work.
• Detection - Your employee activity monitor software should also double as a warning system for data privacy. Investing in high-quality analytics software will help you detect data breaches and privacy violations in real-time, minimizing the cost of non-compliance.
• Reporting - If you use the right monitoring software for employees, you will be able to generate easily auditable reports with detailed logs. These form the core of your compliance initiatives, and being able to generate them in real-time ensures your organization is always prepared to demonstrate compliance.

Depending on the size or your organization and the complexity of its processes, you may approach each of these four steps in a different way. 

For example, large enterprises with thousands of employees may implement artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to identify patterns in employee internet monitoring data. Even a large team of human compliance experts would not be able to perform this task without some kind of automated help – the volume of data is simply too large.

On the other hand, a small business could very well implement a simpler employee tracking app solution. If the business does not regularly deal in large volumes of sensitive data, its employee activity monitor logs will often be enough to demonstrate data privacy compliance.

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Data Privacy Demands a New Approach

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By augmenting your data privacy compliance with a trusted technology vendor, you can ensure your customers’ data is handled securely through every company process. Deploying the right monitoring software for employees enables business agility without putting data privacy at risk.

This approach is not the only way to ensure data privacy, but it is the most balanced one. Cybersecurity and data privacy experts traditionally maintain that there is an inherent tradeoff between security and usability. Until very recently, it was widely accepted that  new security technology forced users to compromise on process speed and efficiency.

As new technology enters the enterprise space, the gap between security and speed is closing. Software developers and vendors are building compliance into the solutions they offer to business clients. It has become front of mind, in demand and a valuable selling proposition.

Leaders can no longer think of compliance as an isolated process. It’s becoming a consideration built into the architecture of the business itself. Every operation and employee role has a compliance element that is distinct and unique.

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The No-Compromise Approach to Data Privacy

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Unfortunately, eliminating every old, unsecured technology being used in the modern workplace is not feasible. Employees will send emails, write SMS messages, and reuse passwords. But your organization’s security and compliance depend on being able to catch and correct unsafe events when they occur.

Organizations that take a proactive approach to tech-enabled regulatory compliance have a far better chance of preventing dangerous data breaches and staying compliant with increasingly onerous privacy regulation . Your  employee remote monitoring software plays a critical role helping you identify and mitigate the risks of non-compliance while generating detailed audit logs -- and does so without you having to compromise on speed.