Should You Buy or Build Your Automated Privacy Incident Risk Assessment Tool?
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In today’s privacy data breach landscape, organizations without an automated privacy incident risk assessment tool cannot scale. In order to grow your business – while also building trust with customers, investors, and regulators – you need to leverage the power of process automation.
Some privacy and security teams will consider the option of building their own automated privacy incident risk assessment tool, as an addition to an existing GRC (Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance) package.
But, that may not be the best approach.
And here’s why. Continue reading as we dive deeper from an ROI and cost-justification perspective.
Purpose-built tools like Radar® Privacy have been developed and enhanced over many years
Radar® Privacy gains part of its intelligence from enabling our customer base in assessing hundreds of thousands of multi-jurisdictional incidents across regulated industries.
The automated risk assessment solution is continually refined as a result of ongoing insight, feedback, and expertise from legal professionals, who serve companies that operate in highly regulated industries, and leading global law firms who specialize in data breach notification.
RadarFirst has a team of attorneys, legal experts, and product managers to monitor all proposed, work-in-process, and recently passed legislation. And as a SaaS-based platform, Radar is able to ensure that any new changes to breach notification laws are live within the platform as of the effective date.
If you’re contemplating building your own homegrown solution, start by considering these questions.
What resources would it take to build and maintain an automated incident risk assessment tool?
Your organization may not have the knowledge, skillset, and amount of data to build a robust algorithm capable of solving for the nuances of constantly changing federal, state, industry and international breach notification laws.
Time is money. A project of this size would take a great investment of time and could stall organizational goals and priorities.
Your internal teams may also not have the capacity to commit to a project of this magnitude.
Building any system – particularly a bolt-on to a GRC or other in-house system – requires extensive research, development, engineering, and testing.
Some of these tasks may involve internal resources, and some may require the assistance of external vendors or consultants.
Questions to ask your team:
→ Can we count on the “timely” support of these third parties to build such a system?
→ Are we confident in their understanding of risk quantification as it relates to data breach notification laws?
→ Given the growth in notification-obligation laws, are we committed to provide ongoing funding for an IT organization to maintain and enhance the homegrown solution for the next decade or more?
→ How long would it take to build an automated privacy incident risk assessment tool? A year? 18 months? 2 years or longer? And what risk would we expose during the “waiting period” for when we have no automated, consistent solution in place?
As a SaaS-based subscription model, RadarFirst offers a predictable cost model, and proven, consistent, and defensible results that meet the expectations of our customers.
Keeping up with a constantly shifting regulatory landscape
The privacy landscape is constantly evolving, adding further complexity to every incident.
Creating an always up-to-date platform without intelligent process automation is no easy feat. Any missed updates would put your organization at risk of noncompliance – resulting in possible fines, investigations, and harmful impacts to brand trust and reputation.
Questions to ask your team:
→ How will our organization keep track of changing legislation and ensure the tool is updated as of the effective date of new laws and regulations?
→ Does our organization have the agility within its change-control process to make constant system changes?
→ How long does it take to “schedule” a change? And what steps, methodologies, and processes go into the development – QA, review, testing, and implementation process?
Solving for the entire incident lifecycle
A custom built incident management platform must go beyond compliance with regulatory breach notification obligations, it needs to also include features that solve for the entire incident lifecycle. These must-haves include:
- Surfacing Third Party Notification Obligations associated with an entity’s role as a Processor, as well as the risk of not meeting those notification deadlines
- Providing support for incidents that have multiple dimensions and require team collaboration
- Benchmarking data to measure your privacy program and accelerate maturity
- Trends and metrics around the risk associated with third parties who service your data
- Controlling access and limiting who can see, and edit, what
Why build, when you can buy?
Radar® Privacy is the world’s leading privacy incident management solution, protected by 8 unique patents and trusted by Fortune 500 industry leaders. Our customers understand the value of process automation in privacy incident management and trust Radar® Privacy to accelerate efficiency and speed time to incident resolution. In fact, one customer reports they have reduced incident processing time by ~80% through the use of Radar.
Innovation is at the core of everything we do at RadarFirst, and as the privacy landscape shifts – Radar® Privacy adapts to make your difficult job a bit easier. We base all of our feature and platform enhancements on the feedback and requests of those who trust and use the solution daily– placing our customers and their reputation at the core of everything we do.