What is privacy management software?

Does it ever feel like you have to choose between your business goals and compliance with data privacy regulations? The laws are changing rapidly, and we’re sure to see many more laws regarding data protection in the future. Keeping up with it all can be a full-time job.

As more countries and states have adopted data privacy regulations, a new category of software has emerged: privacy management software. Even though mistakes under the GDPR and other data privacy laws can cost millions of dollars, data privacy isn't just about staying out of trouble with the authorities.

It’s about giving customers control over their personal data and setting guidelines for how your business collects, stores, and manages it. If you do it well, it can bolster your brand and reassure your customers that you care about their privacy. However, if you do it wrong and a breach occurs, you risk losing customer trust.

This article will discuss what data privacy management software does and some of the standard features that make data privacy tools worth the investment.

What is privacy management software?

Before we talk about the different types of privacy management tools, let’s define what privacy management software is. By implementing privacy management tools at your organization, you can create a holistic picture of your data practices. This type of software can:

• Conduct privacy impact assessments
• Track user consent
• Ensure compliance with data privacy regulations
• Analyze the flow of data
• Alert businesses to breaches
• Create and distribute privacy policies

The benefits of implementing privacy management include:

• Building user trust
• Protecting customer data
• Avoiding costly fallout from a data breach
• Avoiding hefty fines from improper data handling

Because so many different business processes, teams, and stakeholders are involved in data privacy management and because data privacy laws are changing all the time, manual data privacy management just isn't feasible. Instead, businesses need to adopt automated privacy management tools that help them centralize, identify, and manage customer data spread across the organization.

And not only can automated data privacy tools help you stay compliant without wasting time on manual compliance processes, they can also improve your reputation with customers. Customers are becoming increasingly privacy-aware, and take the data privacy practices of businesses into consideration when making a purchasing decision. Businesses can even incorporate their dedication to customers' privacy into their brand messaging to ensure the word gets out.

What types of data privacy tools are available?

With over 365 privacy tech vendors selling products, deciding which is right for your business can be difficult. Not all products have the same capabilities or use cases; identifying which features you need and what challenges they solve is essential to identifying the right data privacy tool. Let’s find out which features are available, so you can determine what’s right for your business.

Data privacy tools often include these features:

• User consent and cookie permissions
• Privacy impact assessments
• Compliance checks with data privacy regulations worldwide
• Alerts for non-compliance
• Data breach tracking and notifications
• Data discovery
• Data mapping
• Risk assessment
• Privacy policy generation and maintenance
• User authentication
• Data security protocols, such as encryption
• Data subject access request management
• An interface where you can edit or delete customer information

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it does represent the sorts of capabilities you need to manage data scattered across hundreds of systems and shared with third-, fourth-, and fifth-party vendors. User data is gold, but the mines aren’t centralized. A data privacy management system can help you organize your data into a centralized management platform. When you know where your data lives, you can sort and manage it easily.

Not all data privacy tools are created equally. The best platforms are easy to use and:

• Automate manual processes
• Require minimal training
• Offer a simple interface
• Automatically tailor protocols for different devices
  

Keep these features in mind as you start searching through different software options. The most suitable privacy management software is the one that integrates with the systems you already have in place.

Privacy management software to help your business

The team at Osano is composed of attorneys, technologists, and business leaders focused on making data privacy simple and accessible to all companies. We’ve created privacy management software that’s easy to use for consumers and businesses. More than 750,000 companies use Osano to keep their websites compliant.

Here’s how you can integrate Osano into your data privacy plan:

• Data Discovery: The first step in privacy management is understanding what data you hold and how it’s stored and managed. Our Data Discovery tool finds, classifies, and evaluates data across multiple systems. This easy-to-implement software can be up and running in less than an hour. Spend less time manually tracking data, and let our intuitive, AI-driven software track and categorize data to keep you compliant.
• Consent Management Platform: Because privacy regulations require explicit consent to track user activity through cookies, it’s essential to let users know what type of data you collect. Then, you need to give consumers a chance to opt in or opt out. Every month, Osano’s Consent Management Platform delivers more than 3 billion consents and records every one on our private quantum blockchain. With just one line of Javascript, you’ll immediately comply with the data privacy laws in more than 50 countries.
• Vendor Risk Monitoring: Protecting customer data isn’t enough. You must be sure all third parties you share data with are managing data appropriately, too. Our Vendor Risk Monitoring service tracks risk changes, notifies you about risky vendors, and follows the data to monitor your vendors and any vendors they use.
• And more: Discover all the Osano products that comprise a well-executed data privacy plan.