GDPR principles are beneficial and could be adopted by all businesses

Supratim Chakraborty, Associate Partner, Khaitan & Co. observes that in the GDPR era, most business houses are frantically trying to put their house in order to be compliant with the data privacy and data protection related requirements of GDPR. “What is most interesting to note is that GDPR has forced business entities to sit up and take a serious look at the data that they have been amassing. Even the smallest of start-ups struggled to decipher how much data they have collected, where they have been stored and how they were processed. Therefore, I would say it is a good wake-up call which should be emulated by all businesses. The principles of GDPR are beneficial and could be adopted by all business houses whether there is an EU interface or not. Also, this may be helpful because our domestic law on this subject, which is in the making, may largely adopt the principles of GDPR. Therefore, organizations which are equipped with the principles of GDPR would be future-ready for the new Indian legislation.” 

The implementation of the GDPR law in Europe has thus stimulated Indian companies to fortify their databases, leading to an upswing in the search for cyber security and privacy professionals. This has also resulted in an upsurge of job postings for cyber security roles. According to data from the job site, Indeed,cyber security job postings have risen up by 150% between January 2017 and March 2018, along with a corresponding increase of 129% in job searches for the same in the same period. Between January 2017 and March 2018, there has also been a spike in the number of job postings for Data Protection roles, which have seen an increase of 143%, while the number of job searches for the same have risen by 188%.