A recent survey, commissioned by MicroWarehouse, Ireland's leading cloud aggregator and largest IT distributor, examines how GDPR has affected Irish companies exactly one month on from compliance deadline.
The survey, which was carried out through face to face interviews with Chief Information Officers (CIO) or IT Leads, shows that over 57% of companies do not think the introduction of GDPR has made any difference to their day to day operations.
Regarding the measures that companies undertook to become GDPR compliant, the research shows that SMEs did not enact any rigorous preparation model, whereas some of the larger companies (employing 30 people or more) even went so far as employing someone to ensure they became GDPR compliant (20%).
According to the respondents, amendments to data breach procedures was the most common action taken to ensure compliance following GDPR (32%). However, in terms of cost, the research indicated that 9 out of 10 SME’s spent up to €5,000 to ensure compliance whereas 43% of the larger companies spent upward of €20,000 in preparation for the May 25th hard deadline.
When questioned about cyber security fears and the level of priority placed on security and hacking, only 13% of the total participants stated that cyber security was one of the main priorities for their company, with a shocking 35% stating it is never discussed at management level.
Aidan Finn, Technical Sales Lead at MicroWarehouse said, “As IT distributors and cloud aggregators we undertook this research to help identify the impact GDPR has had on operations for CIO’s and company IT Leads. As we all know, there was considerable pressure placed on businesses to become GDPR compliant by a strict deadline and as such, we were interested to see how it has impacted their business since that date.
“The research indicates that little or no difference has been recorded to the day to day operations of companies surveyed. It also highlights the costs associated with becoming GDPR compliant, which is particularly onerous on SMEs who are subject to the same regulations as larger companies.
“In relation to cyber security and hacking, we were shocked to learn that security of data is so far down the agenda at a senior management level. Particularly in an era of cybercrime and data leaks, one would think ensuring the security of your network would be in the company’s best interest.”
The research also set out to determine if businesses believed Ireland, collectively, was ahead, on par or behind the curve in terms of adoption and utilisation of the cloud, with a resounding 67% stating they believe we were on par with our European counterparts with only 6% stating that we are leading the way.
The data will be used to inform discussions at the forthcoming Cloud Camp, which is sponsored by MicroWarehouse, which is taking place in the Dublin Convention Centre on the 17/10/2018.
For more information, visit http://www.mwh.ie/
