73% of US and Canadian firms haven’t prepared for GDPR

According to a new survey conducted by DocsCorp, only 27% of US and Canadian firms have begun to prepare for upcoming regulatory changes to data handling under the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Although GDPR is a set of European regulations, the same rules will apply to any firm across the globe that does business either in Europe or with European organisations, or even has employees that are European citizens.

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Those who failed to comply to the regulations may be subject to either a 4% fine of global revenue or €20mn – whichever is larger.

With the new regulations set to be implemented in May 2018, the lack of firms aware of the implications of GDPR is rather worrying. The report, “The current state of GDPR Readiness”, found that 54% of respondents were unaware of the approaching date of the GDPR compliance deadline.

Further, when asked to cite their top concern around GDPR, 55% of firms said it was leaking personal data – something that GDPR aims to prevent.