How GDPR May Actually Be Good for You

In 1999, Scott McNealy, then the CEO of Sun Microsystems, was famously quoted dismissing Internet security as hopeless. “You have zero privacy anyway,” he said. “Get over it.” It was a provocative notion, but let’s just say the European Union’s regulators don’t think that way.

The EU’s new cybersecurity rules—the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)—will be enforced starting on May 25 of this year. The GDPR applies to any organization that does business in the European Union, not just companies based in EU countries, and organizations that don’t meet its requirements could conceivably face fines equal to 20 million euros or 4 percent of their global annual revenue.

Marsh surveyed 1,300 executives globally, and 65 percent said their organization either had plans to comply with the GDPR or were already set. But 11 percent said they had not developed a plan or weren’t planning to create one. And 24 percent didn’t know.