The impending General Data Protection Regulations coming out of the European Union expand to all global companies that service customers in Europe. As a result of the regulations, severe sanctions will be issued for any mishandling of data.

One core tenet of GDPR is requiring companies to only use data that is legally relevant to conducting business. This limitation can actually be leveraged as a stimulus for driving innovation and shifting cultures around data privacy within companies.

“Part of what GDPR requires is what’s called data minimization; you should only be collecting the minimal amount of data you need in order to provide the service you’re going to provide or manage the relationship you’re going to manage. And you are never, as an organization, an owner of that data,” said Sheila FitzPatrick (pictured, right), chief privacy officer at NetApp Inc.

Fitzpatrick and Paul Stringfellow (pictured, left), technical director at Gardner Systems Plc, spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the NetApp Insights event in Berlin, Germany. They discussed how the looming GDPR laws can actually be seen as a boon for innovation. (* Disclosure below.)

Innovation on both value and cost

As companies are forced to surrender ownership of data and reduce the amount of data collected to a minimum, their business lines are forced to be more deliberate about how that data is being used. Rather than viewing this transition as an end of a business model, companies can take the opportunity to be more creative with the limited data sets they work with to differentiate from their competition, according to FitzPatrick.

“As companies become more savvy when it comes to data privacy compliance, not just GDPR, but data privacy laws around the world, they’re also going to see more of that value in the data, be more transparent about it. But that’s also going to allow them to use the data for other purposes, because they’re going to get very creative in how having your data it’s going to actually benefit you as an individual,” FitzPatrick said.

In addition to forcing companies to find smarter ways to create value from less data, the information technology budget also benefits from the cultural shift toward being more deliberate with data. Until GDPR, companies had adopted the mindset of “the more data, the better” without being conscientious about the business value it can deliver.

“One of the other areas where this has business benefit is … better and increased management and better maturity around how we look after our data. … It has huge impact in the cost of storing it. If we want to use cloud services, why am I putting things there that nobody looks at?” Stringfellow concluded. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of NetApp Insight Berlin. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the NetApp Insight Berlin event. Neither NetApp Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE