doteditorial December 2017
This festive season, dotmagazine examines what’s involved in keeping your most valuable business assets – your ID, your finances, customer data, and your reputation – safe and secure.
Judith Ellis
In our last issue for 2017, Safe Xmas, dotmagazine would like to offer you peace of mind, by offering a wealth of advice on how you can keep your most valuable business assets – data, your finances, and your reputation – safe this festive season. Within Europe, the urgency of the forthcoming General Data Protection Regulation is ringing alarm bells – time is running out fast for companies to make sure they are compliant.
Data Protection - time is running out
But the bells are not only pealing for European companies, as Christian Dawson from i2Coalition and Thomas Rickert from the eco Association point out – they’re ringing for any company, based anywhere in the world, that happens to sell or provide services to European citizens. As a result, the looming GDPR takes center stage for the first half of the issue. The GDPR is also the focus for Clarissa Benner, who takes us through a number of specifics relating to the obligation to appoint an EU Representative for companies not based in the EU. And we take a look at how the GDPR will affect business processes and business models through the eyes of St Nicolaus – because even he won’t be able to escape it.
In this issue, we also take a look at a range of different perspectives on data protection. Andreas Weiss, Director of EuroCloud Deutschland, warns against data protection laws becoming overly defensive to the point that they stifle growth. Natalie Eichler and Thorsten Jansen from DWF look at how blockchain processes, generally considered extremely secure, may also be subject to data protection laws – due to the potential capacity to identify individuals through the analysis of anonymized data from many different sources. Vittorio Bertola takes a quite different tack, introducing an alternative online ID, so that we no longer have to sign up for services using our email address or social media accounts. Jani Moilanen from Herman IT expands on some of the technical requirements for data protection, and looks at how Finland is gearing up for the GDPR.
Cyber Security Around the World
The second half of the issue is dedicated to matters of security. Peter Meyer from the eco Association looks at the dangers of fake shops in the run-up to Christmas, and David Jardin from CMS Garden talks about how to keep content management systems secure. Mathias Röckel offers insights into how purchasing IT security software for the company is remarkably similar to Christmas shopping. And DDoS and the destructiveness of the “it’ll never happen to me” attitude in companies is the topic for Chris Townsley from CDNetworks. Meanwhile, Angela Baudach from DXC Technology talks us through the challenges of designing and communicating security policies in multi-national, multi-cultural environments, and Koji Nakao looks at the similarities and differences between data protection and data security in Japan and Europe.
Season’s Greetings!
So there’s plenty of juicy treats here to keep you well-informed and sated throughout December and over the holidays. We wish you a truly safe festive season.
