Only 26% of European companies are fully GDPR compliant, with research suggesting many are taking a piecemeal approach, focusing too heavily on IT to meet requirements.
According to Forrester’s report The State of GDPR Readiness, 30% of companies globally believe they are GDPR compliant, but only a portion have engaged in data discovery and classification exercises, as well as built data flow maps and run gap analysis.
The report states that instead, firms are choosing approaches that are “short-sighted” and that will need “radical revision” after the May 2018 deadline for GDPR compliance.
Financial services most GDPR-ready industry
While European companies are falling behind on GDPR readiness, 33% of North American companies are fully compliant, followed by Asia Pacific and Latin America at 29%. However, the report does show another 22% of European firms expect to be GDPR compliant within 12 months.
The research also found financial services companies are the most mature when it comes to GDPR compliance, being used to data regulation, while industries such as retail and media have a long way to go, despite possessing enormous amounts of personal data to rationalise.
Speaking about the difficulty of determining compliance, the report said: “This is not a simple black-and-white assessment. To make this even more difficult, also consider that many firms still find the interpretation of many GDPR requirements unclear today.”
