GDPR Through a Vendor Lens

Cloud

Sabine Winterkamp Senior Director of International Marketing

Sabine Winterkamp joined Five9 in early 2016 as the Senior Director of Marketing EMEA at Five9 and in this role, she is responsible for all marketing disciplines and activities in the Europe, Middle East and Africa to drive brand awareness and revenue in these markets. Today, she is responsible for all of the international marketing efforts at Five9. She has over fifteen years of marketing experience in the IT business and more than 20 year of business experience with core information and voice service technologies.

July 18, 2018

25^thMay 2018 was THE day – The day when GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) became effective.

There was plenty of uncertainty and panic before this date and some businesses are still in the process of becoming GDPR compliant – even with 24 months of preparation time.

Some are still worried about what GDPR means for their business, their lead generation, etc. even consumers are a bit uncertain about this new regulation.

My advice? Take a moment to look into GDPR through the lens of a cloud vendor as we are: You are running marketing campaigns, talk to people at events, people visit your website, attend in webinars, and much more. So you need to ask yourself: Do I have everything in place to comply with GDPR? What else do I need to think of?

As a software vendor, we always have our customers, and their end-customers, in mind since they work with a lot of data, and rely on a solution being GDPR compliant to protect this data.

We all, as consumers, want to be in control of our data. For example, I received dozens of emails from companies where I order goods and who have my data (I do a lot online, working for a software company), about usage of my data and if I am ok with getting emails from them in the future, too. Ok, but that was a lot of emails.

But, back to the business side of the story…

As you can imagine, data security is key for us. Being GDPR compliance gives businesses a unique advantage. We at Five9 have our own team that is concentrating on security, compliance and other rules and regulations. We as an organization have worked very hard for over a year to get everything in place that we need to be GDPR compliant, successfully.

From my point of view, protecting data does not end with being compliant, secure and getting a certificate about this, it’s an ongoing process.

Now whenever somebody asks me about if we are compliant to GDPR, I am happy to say: YES, we are!

For more information about GDPR, we have related blogs from Melinda Bas, Senior Director of Compliance & Technology at Five9, or visit our TRUST site.