Last updated at Mon, 20 Nov 2017 09:15:00 GMT
Sunny September days in Boston seem a world away as I type this on a somewhat chilly November day in England. Billy Joe Armstrong definitely missed out, what with being asleep and all, not just on some beautiful weather, but also on attending Rapid7’s customer conference: UNITED. And no doubt he’d have been front and centre for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR compliance) or GDP-Argh session. Well, a girl can dream.
Despite my previous worrying, we mustered a good crowd (although the lack of storm troopers was, frankly, a huge disappointment) for mine and Katie’s talk on possibly the hottest compliance topic in the history of the known world. There were a ton of good questions raised by the audience, and even as we climbed the stairs of the amphitheatre to leave, there were people wanting to talk more about the regulation. Conversations didn’t stop there, either; it was obvious in the lobby and outside the front doors that the proverbial penny had dropped for some of our customers who had previously not realised that GDPR compliance also applied to their organisations.
When we put together the session, educating our audience on how to prepare for GDPR was our goal, and it’s fair to say that in many ways we achieved it. That said, I would bet my UNITED rucksack that there are still many non-EU orgs out there who haven’t had the lightbulb moment yet. It won’t be long until the six-month countdown to GDPR begins, and therefore it’s uber important that the message reaches these folks. If you’re reading this and you’re either not sure whether the GDPR applies to your organisation, or indeed you’ve not really gotten around to doing anything yet, then I have some fantastic news for you: You can watch the entire session, in all its wonder (yeah, I know I’m bigging it up maybe a little too much), and in glorious Technicolor as soon as you've downloaded our GDPR toolkit. Which means you also get all of the other toolkit goodness to help you on your GDPR journey too.
We cover what the GDPR is, who should be involved, and what you need to be thinking about. Katie Ledoux on our infosec team also shares some insights into how we didn’t quite get things right in our initial GDPR planning—so that you don’t make the same mistakes.
And if you’re reading this and you happen to be Billy Joe Armstrong, I hope you slept well, and if you’ve got any GDPR questions I’m more than happy to take your call.
(And if you have no idea who Billy Joe Armstrong is, he’s the lead singer of the band Green Day, who wrote a song called Wake Me Up When September Ends...which you can listen to here. See, education!)
