‘We’d love you to stick around’. But stick around where?

Here at Fuse Collaboration Services both our personal and professional email inboxes are receiving a steady flow of emails from companies asking us to stay on their mailing lists. This is the most obvious and public aspect of the new GDPR that is currently being implemented.

There are a couple of positive side-effects from these new regulations, not least that by forcing you to opt in to mailing lists to make sure you are only receiving what you want to receive a company will really know how engaged you are, making your email address all the more valuable when it comes to marketing.

Companies have been responding to the GDPR changes by re-working their data management policies, but how much time is being put into how these policies can be enacted day-to-day, especially away from the aforementioned marketing email lists?

For example, if you have written a policy that says that emails are going to be stored for one year before deletion, how are you going to store them away from an active email server (thereby reducing the burden on a day-to-day server), or keep hold of them once a member of staff leaves? Or what happens if data is accidentally deleted by a member of staff?

Furthermore, data security is made all the more important as more and more companies opt for a flexible working approach where their staff can work from remote locations, such as home or (dare we say it) a high street coffee chain with its free Wi-Fi access.

Domestic or public internet access networks are unlikely to have the same levels of security as a company's, which makes it all the more important that any data transfer between a central hub and remote laptop is encrypted and has the latest security.

Chris Evans of Computer Weekly has highlighted five areas which will impact the day-to-day work of the data storage manager under GDPR, including:

• encryption;
• detailed application-to-storage mapping;
• security and audit;
• validation of test and development requirements;
• and collaborating closely with colleagues.

Ultimately, you need to be able to give all your customers, clients, stakeholders and staff the confidence that their data and documents are stored securely, but also in a way that allows you to respond to data requests quickly and efficiently without having to wade through a mound of irrelevant information.

You also need to have the peace of mind that any deleted information can be recovered within your policy timetables, whether they be one year, five years, or longer than that.

There is also a danger that you could be sucked into a one-size-fits-all approach using policy and storage templates that have been designed for organisations that are in a different sector or are of a vastly different size to your own.

Fuse's data back-up and storage solutions tick all of the boxes you need to have that peace of mind to concentrate on your main business, namely growing as a company, while also being tailored to your specific needs.

Fuse uses a mixture of cloud-based packages to meet your requirements and allow your staff to access their relevant information securely regardless of where they are working. Our solutions are also easy to monitor by your in-house IT team, so that in the unlikely event of a data breach it can be identified, resolved and reported quickly.