GDPRValidator: a tool to enable companies using cloud services to be GDPR compliant

Abstract

This article presents a tool called GDPRValidator that aims to assist small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that have migrated their services, or a part of them, to the cloud to be General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant when they manage and store employees’ or customers’ data in the cloud. As these companies have a limited budget to hire legal experts to guide them in complying with GDPR, the main objective of this tool is to help SMEs to be more competitive by saving a considerable amount of money. By using GDPRValidator, these companies can learn and begin the GDPR compliance process by themselves and decide whether it will be necessary to hire GDPR legal experts in the end. GDPRValidator implements a process that aids companies in compliance analysis and validation and generates a series of documents with recommendations. These documents do not guarantee full GDPR compliance, but they can help the company better understand the regulation and improve its data management strategies. In order to validate the efficiency and efficacy of the tool, two SMEs have used it and provided feedback about its perceived ease of use and its perceived usefulness for understanding and complying with GDPR. The results of the validation showed that, for both companies, the degree of perceived usefulness and ease of use of GDPRValidator is quite good. All the scores expressed agreement.

Keywords

• Data privacy
• GDPR
• GDPR compliance
• Cloud services
• SMEs
• Data privacy recommendations