IT companies – Do you know how to help your clients be GDPR compliant?

IT support companies are the key to being able to access business information in a timely manner. Most small businesses outsource their IT support to another small IT Support Business. This can be a challenge when neither business knows how they should be complying with GDPR. Whenever I am working with a business on their GDPR compliance, the sticking point is always with the IT support company. Generally, the IT support company’s terms and conditions are not GDPR compliant and that’s if they have any!

IT Support companies are an invaluable resource when you are running a small business, they can keep you connected and sort out any issues that you have, provide invaluable advice and knowledgeable service……….about IT. GDPR is not their knowledge base. I have had some clients who have followed their IT providers advice about GDPR and being getting it seriously wrong.

IT support companies can do so much more to help their clients with GDPR compliance and good data privacy practices. First stop is for IT companies to understand the role they play for each company. Usually an IT company will be a data processor, so the terms and conditions or contract that you put in place should reflect this arrangement.

IT Support Companies can also be transparent about how they are accessing company information and who has access to that information. Are they employees of the IT company or third party providers? If they are third parties working on behalf of the IT support company, make sure that there is some due diligence in place to protect the  that they may have access to.

I have a lot of discussions with IT companies about access to personal information. Some of them say they never look at a clients files and therefore never see any personal information belonging to the company. That may well be true, but it’s not the fact that they are not looking in the electronic files, it’s that they could.

We are developing some supporting paperwork for IT companies so would love to hear what you think would be useful to be included and if you want to trial it for us, please get in touch.