A recent study published by NTT security has discovered that over 75% of US Business leaders have an acute lack of GDPR awareness. The report “entitled: security always a journey never a destination” highlighted that three-quarters of non-IT leaders at U.S. firms believe that the European Union’s upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) just does not apply to them.
This belief could not be further from the truth. Unfortunately, the new regulation does apply to US businesses and to make matter worse; the clock is ticking until the new rule becomes law in May 2018.
The findings uncovered in this survey are not unique to the US. The study also found that business leaders in Hong Kong (29 percent), Australia (26 percent) and Singapore (33 percent) also lacked awareness of the law and its impact on any organization that houses data collected from EU citizens.
The new comprehensive study was carried out in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Sweden, Norway, Hong Kong, Australia and Singapore. Up to Thirty-five percent of the respondents to the research were C-level executives.
The new regulation stipulates that a company must know where its data resides and who can access it. Unfortunately, the NTT Security study found that one-third of employees interviewed had no idea where their data is residing, and pointed to the need for corporate training on the subject. Of the two-thirds of employees who knew where data is residing, less than half understood how the regulation would affect that data.
A senior vice president at NTT security, Garry Sidaway stated that the NTT Security study indicates that a majority of companies either do not yet have the issue on their radar or are else choosing to ignore the new regulation altogether.