Businesses collecting data on EU residents are forced to waste valuable time and money on efforts to get and stay compliant and avoid fines.

GDPR compliance shouldn’t have to require such a substantial investment of time, money, and effort to achieve. 

Automation can reduce the time, effort, and money needed to achieve compliance by making the process more efficient.

How Long Does GDPR Compliance Take Without Automation?

Getting GDPR compliant requires a significant amount of manual work and time.

While the exact timeline depends on factors like the size of the organization and the amount of personal data they process, there are several steps every organization must take, including but not limited to:

• Conducting an information audit
• Establishing a process for cross-border data transfers
• Creating a data retention policy and procedure for secure data disposal
• Creating a data register
• Creating and publishing a privacy notice
• Creating an internal data protection policy
• Conducting a data protection impact assessment
• Creating a breach notification policy and procedure
• Completing vendor risk assessments
• Establishing a data processing agreement with any third parties that process personal data on your behalf

It’s estimated that completing these GDPR readiness initiatives would take a small or medium-sized company over 200 hours to complete.

What does that mean in terms of months? In a survey of 300 privacy professionals from small to large organizations, organizations took 7 months on average to achieve GDPR readiness.

This does not include the time it would take to maintain compliance either.

How Much Does GDPR Compliance Cost Without Automation?

Like the compliance timeline, GDPR compliance costs vary depending on a wide range of factors, including:

• The number of employees
• The number of vendors
• The number of geographic locations and data centers
• The size and complexity of the cloud environment
• The amount and type of data being processed
• How you’re processing and using data
• The scope and complexity of your information security program

On average, small- and mid-sized organizations can expect to spend more than $100,000 to get and stay compliant with GDPR. Larger organizations can expect to spend even more.

According to a 2020 report by DataGrail, 20% of small- and mid-sized organizations spent more than $1 million to maintain GDPR compliance annually, and only 6% of all organizations spent less than $50,000. The global professional services firm Ernst & Young estimated that the world’s 500 biggest corporations spent almost $8 billion in 2018 to comply with GDPR. 

The high costs of achieving and maintaining GDPR compliance are essentially due to the fact that organizations must either purchase multiple security tools, dedicate an existing team or hire a new one, or hire a third-party consultant or firm to design, implement, and monitor GDPR’s privacy mandates on a continuous basis.

Take a third-party consultant or firm, for example. They can help conduct a gap analysis, create a remediation plan, and assess your organization for GDPR compliance — but at significantly high costs. On average, companies can expect to pay a consulting firm at least $20,000 for gap assessments, $15-25,000 for remediation planning, and $30,000+ per year for compliance assessments. 

Why Automation is a Game-Changer for GDPR Compliance

Secureframe’s compliance automation streamlines the compliance process. We save teams hundreds of hours and tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars spent writing security policies, collecting evidence, hiring security consultants, and performing readiness assessments.

And because Secureframe automates as much as possible from beginning to end, you’ll get GDPR compliant faster, save money, and strengthen your security posture.

Checklists and Dashboards for Readiness 

Assign tasks to individuals on your team throughout your preparation and track your progress towards being audit-ready. You’ll always have a real-time view of what’s looking good and what you can do to improve before bringing in your auditor.

Automated Evidence Collection to Streamline Audits

We automatically pull evidence throughout the year for seamless submission to your auditor. Easily upload and classify any additional evidence to the Data Room for export.

Expert Support from Readiness to Report

Our team of in-house compliance experts has decades of audit advisory and consulting experience. They understand your company’s specific requirements, provide tailored advice for an ironclad security posture, and guide you through the compliance process.

Continuous Monitoring to Maintain Compliance

From your cloud infrastructure to your vendor ecosystem, we continuously scan and monitor your tech stack for vulnerabilities and help you stay compliant.

Hundreds of companies trust Secureframe to streamline GDPR compliance. If you’re ready to get started, schedule a demo with one of our product experts.