At Anonomatic we talk to a lot of people who have a myriad of issues surrounding Data Privacy. An interesting trend we’ve noticed is the older, more established the organization, the more likely they are to consider Data Privacy to be a legal matter best addressed with agreements, procedures and audits. While understandable, this viewpoint leaves the door open for a multitude of inefficiencies and competitive disadvantage.

If you consider Data Privacy to be a legal problem, then you likely know what we mean. Protecting private data typically starts with a seemingly, never-ending series of meetings and negotiations involving teams of expensive attorneys going back and forth over minute details followed by laborious processes and procedures, ongoing sign-offs, and restrictive limitations on what, how and when data can be accessed or used and by whom. This is all so detailed, tedious, and incredibly serious that it is often handed over to teams or platform solutions who don’t really understand your business and are not focused on your core mission but focused on protecting you from expensive lawsuits and fines. The reality is if your software does the job for you, almost all these issues just go away because privacy was designed into your system from the ground up.

For example, if you are old enough to remember learning the Dewey Decimal System, so you could walk to the right shelf to find a physical book in a library, or if you ever drove to a video store to rent a movie, then you probably thought at the time those were really efficient solutions. Looking back now it is easy to see how efficient software can make even the most seemingly effective manually processes obsolete.

The global problem of Data Privacy will never be solved until software does its part.

That said, the more entrenched (i.e., old) your software is, the more difficult it will be to address Data Privacy by process and committee. However, like so many other things, accepting the problem is the first step to solving it. If you are addressing your Data Privacy needs with processes and platforms, then you need to find a software solution which eliminates the need for those processes. We know it sounds impossible, but it isn’t. It just requires taking viewing the problem from a different perspective. On the other hand, if you are building a new system, or even making a major enhancement on your legacy system, and you don’t build Data Privacy into your solution, then you may as well be writing it in COBOL because you are dooming yourself to never ending cost, support, and maintenance issues.

The good news is that there are companies who do understand the fact that software can solve Data Privacy. Anonomatic is one of these companies and can help you if you are building a new system, had the same one for decades or are somewhere in between.