Prepare for the EU's General Data Protection Regulations with these tools

Last week during Microsoft Inspire, the Redmond company talked about the upcoming European Union General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), which go into effect in May of 2018, and how they are already prepared across their Azure products and services before the regulations go into effect.

One method to help with compliance according to the Director of Office 365 Partner Marketing, Diana Pallais, is the newly announced Microsoft 365 subscription options that help customers comply with the GDPR including transparency, accountability, and record keeping. The Microsoft 365 subscription includes Windows 10, Office 365, and Enterprise Mobility and Security (EMS) to assist customers in building solutions to identify, classify, and govern the use of personal data which are required under GDPR.

This week Microsoft has announced two tools that can help customers in preparing for these new regulations.

GDPR Assessment

This online 26 question self evaluation allows a company to evaluate their readiness for GDPR through a series of questions across the following areas:

-- Segmentation
-- Discovery
-- Management
-- Protection

The end result is a report that you can then print out and use to plan your path to compliance with GDPR.

Detailed GDPR Readiness Assessment Tool

This tool is built around helping Microsoft Partners to gain compliance with the GDPR and then streamline that out to helping their own customers become compliant as well.

There are 19 different assets in this toolkit that provide assessment tools and information for this process - here are the ones that are valuable to any company and not just Microsoft Partners:

-- GDPR Assessment
-- GDPR Detailed Assessment
-- GDPR Demos
-- GDPR Activity Hub
-- Security Practice Development Playbook
-- GDPR: The Time is Now!
-- GDPR Briefing Deck
-- GDPR 101
-- GDPR Whitepapers
-- GDPR Compliance
-- GDPR Comments
-- GDPR Webcast
-- Brendon Lynch on GDPR
-- GDPR FAQs
-- GDPR on Trust Center

This entire process is like migrating your company to Windows 10 or Office 365 - the planning should start early so the time is now to get up to speed on the GDPR and create that transition plan so your company is ready for the deadline of 25 May 2018.

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But, wait...there's probably more so be sure to follow me on Twitter and Google+.

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