Skillcast, one of the UK’s leading regulatory-compliance-training and apps integrators, has launched two new tools to help businesses comply with the GDPR. Vivek Dodd, Chief Operating Officer at Skillcast, said, "GDPR compliance is likely to be a journey rather than a one-off event. Once they get past the G-day, businesses will find that there's still a lot of work to fine tune their processes, set best practices, provide continual training, and prepare their employees to meet the demands for increased data security and rights of individuals. We are working with our clients to develop tools to help them comply more cost effectively and ultimately give them a competitive advantage in an increasingly regulated world."

Mr Dodd, whose company works with some of the UK’s biggest employers, said the new GDPR compliance tools would provide re-assurance for businesses facing the most significant regulatory change in a generation.

"Our GDPR Navigator and GDPR Compass can help companies improve their GDPR compliance cost effectively,” he said. “These tools strengthen Skillcast's GDPR offering, which already includes a comprehensive GDPR training library, a policy hub for managing policy attestations, serious games for competency mapping, and a fully managed compliance portal for delivering these in the organisation."

The GDPR Navigator app enables companies to provide instant answers to any GDPR-related questions that their employees have, with links to further training if needed. Also, a benefit of the tool is that companies can vet and edit the answers, and add new ones, to ensure that their employees are getting information that is correct and in line with their policies, procedures, and controls.

Meanwhile, the GDPR Compass app is a 360-degree compliance-audit tool that collects GDPR readiness information from key staff at all levels, including frontline staff who actually process personal data on a daily basis. Based on this information, the app presents RAG (Red, Amber, and Green) ratings at organisation, department, and team levels. The content of this tool is based on ICO checklists and can be further customised to fit an organisation's operations.

Mr Dodd concluded, "The risks of non-compliance are high. Forget the million euro fines; the more likely threat for businesses is that the ICO will ask them to stop processing data - thus effectively shutting down their operations - until they become compliant. So it pays for companies to put compliance measures in place now, rather than wait until they're forced to do so under the watchful eyes of the regulator."