by Angela Guess

According to a recent article, “Here at Silwood Technology, we’ve conducted research into five of the largest and most widely used application packages to understand the scale of the challenge encountered by our customers when locating personal data for GDPR compliance. It is vital to perform this ‘discovery’ work for any GDPR project. Without a clear understanding of where personal data is located in each of the systems in an enterprise, it will not be a straightforward task to carry out any of the steps to reach GDPR compliance. The research reveals that the task facing organizations in the coming few months is significant. In SAP alone there are over 900,000 fields that may (or may not) contain personal information that require data discovery and risk assessment. The size and complexity of the databases mean that businesses that are not well-advanced in data discovery or are undertaking manual discovery processes may not be ready on time for GDPR.”

The article goes on, “Using Safyr®, our metadata discovery software, the research team selected the top five application packages based on customer base and size – SAP, JD Edwards, Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, Siebel and Oracle E-Business Suite. The terms Date of Birth and Social Security Number were selected for test purposes and searches performed to see how often they appeared. The researchers using Safyr were able to conduct these searches across whole systems in just a few minutes. This is due to Safyr’s unique ability to retrieve detail about each application from the application layer itself – including any customizations made by the customer. Safyr is designed specifically to make the discovery of metadata in ERP and CRM packages easy, fast and accurate.”

Read more at Silwood Technology.

Photo credit: Silwood