Many small businesses – especially those with a web-based product or service – choose to use an outsourced Data Protection Officer to fulfill their GDPR obligations. These same SMBs are often the least inclined to outsource anything, but yet they happily choose to outsource their Data Protection Officer function. Why?
What SMBs Hesitate to Outsource
We talk with SMBs every day, all day, and even though most of our conversations are “officially” about cybersecurity, along the way we learn an awful lot about the backstory of our clients. One thing that we’ve learned about, is what they choose not to outsource. In brief, we find SMBs very hesitant to outsource functions where they have the internal expertise to complete the task at hand, but continually fail to find the time to complete the task.
A perfect example is seen in companies that have an onshore engineering team made up of full-time employees, but a huge (insurmountable?) backlog of features that they’d like that team to build. Whether logical or not (we’re not taking sides), we see many small businesses in that situation that simply continue along their current staffing model, perhaps getting more thoughtful about their prioritization efforts, but not moving towards an outsourcing of incremental resources to boost their capacity.
Have you seen that in the small businesses you are close to? We have.
What SMBs Choose to Outsource
In comparison, in our daily exposure to SMBs, we find them (comparatively) much more amenable to outsourcing responsibilities where they have both an urgency to complete a task and a lack of internal expertise to even understand (let alone execute) the steps required to fulfill the task. A straightforward example is tax preparation: few C Corporations that are beyond a trivial level of complexity choose to prepare their own taxes unless they have tax professionals on staff.
It’s by this same logic, that we hear from SMBs that opt for an outsourced data protection officer. The clients that we have that use Havoc Shield as a DPO-as-a-Service tend to have no internal employee that has intimate knowledge of the mechanics of setting up a GDPR compliance program. It’s not that these clients are naïve – in fact, they are sophisticated. Sophisticated enough to understand that they urgently need credible GDPR compliance, and that they have no straight line to confidently achieving that compliance without internal expertise on the topic.
Outsourced Data Protection Officer Services
Also called DPO-as-a-Service, the concept of outsourced data protection officer services is something we know well at Havoc Shield. Our platform includes the necessary acknowledgement workflows, training workflows, and policy implementations necessary to create a GDPR compliance program that has compelling audit trails and reports. Further, our clients achieve their urgent need for GDPR compliance without having page through the legalese text of the articles of the GDPR. Want to know more about how to advance your GDPR compliance with a prescriptive process that guides you through the effort of compliance? Our outsourced data protection officer service may be just the right thing – and we’re standing by to discuss it with you.
