The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) presents a compliance hurdle for businesses. Gautam Roy, head of product security of Automation Anywhere, highlights why many businesses are turning to intelligent automation as a scalable way to address CCPA and future data privacy legislation.
The 2020s are already shaping to be a decade defined by big data with the advent of 5G and the explosion of connected devices. In this new era, we’ll see even more pressure on companies to be fully transparent about the information they collect and how it’s used.
The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) was the first significant piece of global legislation addressing data security and updating the way businesses collect information about private citizens in the internet age. And from GDPR, we learned that maintaining compliance can be a laborious (and costly) process.
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) will take full effect starting January 2020, meaning that organizations will need to review and process the personal data they have collected on the nearly forty million people who currently call the state home. It won’t be long before other states, countries, and regions worldwide follow suit.
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Who should be worried?
Nearly everyone. CCPA empowers California residents with ownership and control of their data. Still, the ramifications will extend far beyond California-based companies – CCPA will impact any organization that does business in the state and thereby potentially possesses the personal data of Californians.
Achieving and maintaining compliance will come at a hefty cost. According to the impact assessmentOpens a new window prepared by Berkeley Economic and Advising and Research, CCPA will cost businesses between $467 million and $16.5 billion by 2030. The potential costs are significant for enterprises both large and small – those with fewer than 20 employees will incur an average initial charge of $50,000 USD up to businesses with more than 500 employees, which will incur an average initial cost of USD 2 million.
Bring on the intelligent bots
So how can companies comply with these new data privacy regulations without spending millions? The solution lies in an intelligent digital workforce, also known as robotic process automation – AI-driven software bots that work hand-in-hand with human workers to automate the manual, repetitive tasks they do every day.
RPA provides businesses with a scalable method to address compliance for CCPA and any future data privacy legislation that is passed. Most user data is stored across distinct CRM and ERP databases, making it massively laborious for human compliance teams to find and process the enormous volumes of disparate information, given our natural limitations (like the need to sleep, attention to detail, etc.) Bots, however, can run 24/7 and allow businesses to locate and process user data from disparate sources, so they can automatically review, aggregate, and organize these large and complicated data sets, at scale.
Bots are also becoming more intelligent. The latest machine learning (ML) techniques, such as computer vision and unsupervised learning, allow bots to read and process “dark†data (the unstructured information hidden in documents, emails, and images), so businesses can sort through and process content that previously would have required human intervention.
With advanced analytics dashboards, RPA platforms also give business leaders a holistic, real-time view into how compliance bots are performing. As new data privacy and governance laws come into effect, having visibility across the entire compliance department and organization will be critical for leaders to identify and resolve issues or inefficiencies as they come up.
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The beginning of the data governance wave?
Many experts predict that CCPA is a harbinger of many other data privacy laws to follow. Imagine the challenge of remaining compliant not only in California and the EU but in every state and country worldwide – each with their own unique data privacy legislation.
For businesses struggling with GDPR and CCPA compliance, the prospect of adding more legislation and an increasing number of customer data requests appears to be an impossible challenge. Or is it? The reality is that there are already several organizations using RPA for compliance – with excellent results. For example, a software bot can be used by data controllers and data processors to find, collect and remove data pertaining to personal data from any number of data sources – by leveraging software bots, it decreases errors, increases efficiency, and alleviates manual tasks.
Deloitte’s third annual RPA survey found that a whopping 92 percent of respondentsOpens a new window said RPA met or exceeded their expectations when it came to compliance, surpassing satisfaction across productivity (86 percent), cost reduction (59 percent) and other categories.
With the right process-oriented technology in place, businesses can seamlessly wrangle data chaos and comply with the new wave of regulations and protect their consumers’ privacy as a result.
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