CIO’s Role in Data Privacy and How Businesses Can Handle Their Data Privacy Better

Data Privacy and What Businesses and CIOs Can do to Protect it

The role of an CIO in Data Privacy

CIOs are crucial in building the fundamental skills needed for a long-lasting privacy program. From then, businesses must continue to scale for “reoccurring tasks” while managing continuous administrative and resource management.

CIOs have the chance to expand specialized technology and privacy-related solutions as they help to build the digital economy. Through “off-label” technological applications, such as IRM, security, and risk management, CIOs can improve privacy controls.

When businesses can track the data processing they do, the danger to privacy is reduced. CIOs may assist manage risk while getting insights if the gaps between unregulated personal data, data lifecycle and its goals, access, and server side rendering are bookmarked by privacy management, control, and user experience.


1. Streamline Policies

Across the data lifecycle, enterprises should adopt uniform processes and guidelines. Companies will be able to comprehend the data they gather, utilize, and share, as well as how these actions affect customers.


Organizations may swiftly decide what needs to be done to address consumer requests in accordance with privacy requirements by establishing policies and standards for the aforementioned. Companies should ensure that policies are followed and communicated broadly since failure to do so might encourage the adoption of inconsistent templates and practices.

2. Establishing Data Ownership and Awareness Across the Company

Maintaining data privacy is a shared responsibility. By adhering to agreed norms for data collection, usage, and sharing, all employees may help safeguard data privacy. Training staff on governance principles, roles, and obligations as well as data privacy principles and laws is necessary for successfully adopting a data governance model with privacy in mind.

Organizations can identify their intended data governance roles, such as data owners, data stewards, data architects, and data consumers, and then customize the roles to meet their needs after developing a governance vision and raising employee awareness. Some businesses could make a distinction between data owners and data stewards. This framework makes communication simple and made it possible for the customer to grow its data management procedures.

Long-term talent strategy and workforce planning for businesses should include data governance and management capabilities. Everyone in the  company  should be adaptable in changing their data governance responsibilities and ownership as their strategic goals and legal needs change.

3. Upgrading

Businesses may also need to deal with issues caused by outdated technology and technological debt in order to properly deploy data governance frameworks and assure privacy compliance.

The security and privacy threats that outsourced cloud services, such cloud-based data lakes, represent must also be assessed by businesses. Those that use several cloud service providers might want to optimize their data sharing contracts to ensure uniformity between suppliers.

Companies may also want to think about using new privacy compliance technologies, which can improve data governance by making data more visible and transparent. Data flow mapping tools assist businesses in understanding how and where data travels both internally and externally, while data discovery solutions utilize advanced analytics to find data items that may be deemed sensitive. Organizations can use these tools to estimate the level of security needed for their most important data pieces.

4. Having an Adaptable Model

Organizations should regularly modify their data governance structures as the global data privacy landscape changes. Instead of responding to recent and upcoming privacy laws, businesses can proactively handle their duties by establishing data governance roles, procedures, policies, and technology with privacy in mind.

Furthermore, Companies won’t address tomorrow’s vulnerabilities if they fix their systems based on today’s vulnerabilities. Although technology and governmental requirements are always changing, the company must make sure that the rules continue to be visible, clear, and succinct.