A Simple Journey to GDPR Compliance: Data Reporting

So, you’re trying to make sense of these new data protection regulations being implemented by the European Union. Breaking down your compliance process into steps can help make the task a little easier. By now you should have discovered the data within your inventory, created a plan for data governance, and built a protection process. Data reporting is the last step to implement your compliance process. You must execute on data requests, report data breaches, and keep required documentation to ensure that your company is not liable for fines and penalties.

Ensuring adequate process controls and appropriate reporting of data on hand must be top of mind for GDPR compliance within your organization. This includes delegating an employee who is responsible for conducting interviews with staff members in the event of a breach investigation.

Four Key Steps to Compliance

Microsoft suggests four key steps that will help guide you through the process of GDPR compliance:

1. Discover
2. Manage
3. Protect
4. Report

In this blog, we’ll discuss the last step, Report. The second step involves documenting and reporting how data is used or if it is exposed under your control.

What Questions Should you be Asking for Data Governance?

During the Manage step, you should be asking five questions:

1. Does your organization keep transparent records?
2. Do you have a breach notification plan?
3. Do you have a governance plan for handling data subject requests?
4. Have you completed a Data Protection Compliance Review?
5. Have you trained your employees for best practices in reporting?

Here is a flowchart to help you better understand the actions needed to ensure that you’ve successfully completed the fourth step of becoming GDPR compliant:

Next Steps of GDPR Compliance

GDPR compliance is not a journey with a clear ending. You must continuously assess your data inventories and practices to make sure your company is staying up-to-date with protection systems. Start back at step 1 to make sure your information is properly classified.

If you’re interested in gaining deeper insights into GDPR, or would like to learn how to leverage these tools and more from Microsoft 365, you can take our in-depth courses outlining how to lead your company to become compliant.

We have many courses that teach you the details of becoming GDPR compliant, including ones that outline these four key steps utilizing Microsoft 365 tools.