Saturday, May 11, 2024
Home » Cloud » Understand The Role Of DPO Under GDPR Compliance

Understand The Role Of DPO Under GDPR Compliance

  author
Written By Ashwani Tiwari
Mack John
Approved By Mack John  
Published On May 31st, 2018
Reading Time 4 Minutes Reading

The blog will help you in learning about the role of DPO under GDPR is handling the cloud data security and supervising compliance.

An Overview On DPO & Role Of DPO Under GDPR

The term ‘DPO’ stands for Data Protection Officer whose responsibility is to lead organization security. This officer will be having duty of supervising the cloud security strategies and their implementation for ensuring the GDPR compliance with all requirements.

In the European Union, all enterprises need to perform a GDPR call for the essential appointment of the DPO. This is required for strengthening and streamlining the information security for citizens living in the EU. No matter whether the enterprise processes or stores bulk personal data, it is mandatory to adopt a DPO under GDPR compliance. It needs to be appointed for all the public authorities and the place where control and processing of secretive data take place. Know more why Role of DPO under GDPR is important for European Union.

Responsibility And Requirements Of DPO

A major role of data protection officer comes when the GDPR compliance comes into the existence. According to the Article 37, all the organizations that gather or process personal information of EU citizens have to adopt this. The officers will be responsible to educate the firm and its employees about the importance of compliance requirements. They have to train users who work with data and need to conduct time-to-time security audits. The role of DPO under GDPR is also to act as an intermediate between the firm and SAs (Supervisory Authorities) who oversees the activities going on the information.

Following are the points that are included in GDPR Article 39 for DPO:

  • Educate each and every member about compliance requirements importance.
  • Well-trained and guide the staff members who are involved in the data processing.
  • Ensure compliance with conducting audits and determine the potential issues proactively.
  • Serve as a contact point in between the GDPR Supervisory Authorities and the company.
  • Real-time monitoring performance and rendering advice to put more efforts on data protection.
  • Holding the comprehensive data records that involve processing of operations by the firm. It also comprises of the main purpose to use the data, which should be applicable for public, as well.
  • Connect with the interface of data security for informing about the information being accessed, their authority to remove the personal data, and measures need to be put to keep information secure.

Qualifications That A Data Protection Officer Needs To Have

There are no specific credentials that are expected by a DPO to have. But, in the current published WP29 guidelines, minimum requirements are printed associated with the DPO’s skills and expertise:

  1. Level of Expertise – Should be capable of understanding that how to construct, execute, and handle the cloud data security applications. The more the complex data processing activities take place, the more high-level DPO expertise will be needed.
  2. Professional Skills – It is not a core need that DPOs need to be lawyers. But, they should have expertise skills in national and European data protection law. They should be known with the deep knowledge regarding GDPR. The officer should be capable enough to understand technology as well as the structural behavior of the firm. He/she should be updated from cloud computing trending technologies and cloud storage securities.

In public authority or body case, a DPO must be having an excellent knowledge about the administrative rules as well as procedures.

Policies Need To Be Implemented By DPOs

The Data Protection Officer needs to execute policies and all procedures to handle the outsourcing of data processing activities. This can include operations like utilization of 3rd party vendor for the human resources, marketing, information technology, etc.

Time To Wind Up

The role of DPO under GDPR compliance is to secure the personal information of the customers. Since there is absence of well-trained people who can handle responsibilities, outsourcing these activities and roles might help the firm to address all the GDPR compliance requirements by focusing on the business growth. A DPO should be having intelligent skills of data management and have the ability to interact easily with the internal entities. The DPO right must be assuring of internal compliance and notifying authorities about the non-compliance. This will help a firm to understand the things on time and keep themselves safe from huge fines for non-compliance.