For VARs and Service Providers, The Time Is Ripe to Help Customers with GDPR

GDPR, Europe’s imminent new privacy regulation, presents several urgent challenges to your business customers and prospects. This presents a great opportunity for you to improve their GDPR compliance posture with Acronis products and services. We’ve created a raft of GDPR educational and marketing materials to make your job easier. 

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes live next week (25 May 2018), imposing strict new requirements on any business that serves EU residents to protect their personal data. The penalties for non-compliance are stiff – between 2 to 4 million euros, or 2 to 4 percent of a company’s annual revenues, whichever is greater.

These new privacy rules add many new responsibilities to any company that captures personal information about EU-based customers. These responsibilities include: 1) taking much stronger measures to protect it against tampering, spying and theft; 2) reporting any security failures to authorities (and to customers, if the breach is serious enough); and 3) giving customers much broader rights to access, correct and delete their personal data.

The complexity of the regulation is confusing to many businesses, and clarity is hard to come by. The EU does not provide hard-and-fast guidelines on how to attain compliance, preferring to give companies wide flexibility on technology and policy implementation choices. Further, there are no certification standards to help companies understand when they have achieved compliance.

Many businesses are just waking up to the fact, mere days before the regulation goes live, that they are subject to it. While they may have previously believed that GDPR only applies to companies based in the EU, in fact it applies to any company, regardless of its location, that captures or handles the personal data of an EU resident.

Most businesses are confused as to where to start, and IT organizations correctly feel some pressure to build GDPR compliance plans. (Technology measures are only part of any GDPR compliance solution – policies and procedures are equally important – but IT presents an obvious starting point.) Many IT operations professionals are scrambling for answers to some tough questions they know will come when their senior leadership becomes aware of the issue, namely, “What are we [meaning you] doing to prepare for this?”

The business challenges that result from this confusion and urgency to act are a golden opportunity for IT product resellers and service providers. You are in an excellent position to deliver consultative advice, technology building blocks, design / implementation direction, employee training, and other kinds of value to customers who are struggling to get up the GDPR compliance path. While the first-mover advantage is slipping away, your GDPR sales window has a long life.

Even though the deadline is days away, many of your customers are still barely in the starting blocks: a recent survey found that UK businesses are the best prepared for GDPR, followed by EU countries, followed by the rest of the world. (We have been here before. Consider how long it takes some of them to upgrade their servers when an old Microsoft release goes into end-of-support.)

If you are ready to take advantage of this opportunity to help your prospects and customers solve a thorny, time-sensitive business problem, Acronis is here to help you with:

• Data protection and storage products and services that can help businesses address GDPR requirements like security of processing, cross-border data transfers, and breach notifications, as well as above-and-beyond-the-standard features like prevention of ransomware breaches.

• Educational materials in the form of articles and blog posts to help you and your customers understand GDPR terminology, its key requirements, and some pragmatic, tactical steps you can help them take to move up the compliance path.

• A large collection of webinars, marketing assets and packaged campaign materials to help you nudge prospects steadily down the funnel to buying Acronis-based products and services to improve their GDPR compliance posture. These include three business-oriented webinars, an infographic, FAQ and checklist, and a multi-touch email campaign with banner ads, landing pages and calling scripts.

All of these materials can be found on the Acronis Partner Portal. If you are an Acronis partner but haven’t registered for the Portal, go here.  If you are interested in becoming an Acronis reseller or service provider partner, contact us here [channels@acronis.com].

The clock is ticking on GDPR readiness, and your customers urgently need your help. Take advantage of this great opportunity to be their GDPR superhero: get ahold of these timely educational and marketing resources today.