Nóirín O’Sullivan, the former commissioner of the Irish police service, an Garda Síochána has submitted a Subject Access Request (SAR) under section 17 of the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) to retrieve all information being held by certain large media organisations.

Data Protection Officials (DPOs) from these organisations must now search all their environments for any structured or unstructured data relating to Garda O’Sullivan and return a report of all information held on the former commissioner within 30 days. The GDPR demands that this data be returned within the 30-day limit or they will find themselves being hit with heavy fines from EU regulators.

The former commissioner has lodged several defamation cases against the media organisations, which they have vehemently opposed, and the SAR request of her data may be valuable evidence as the cases proceed.

This is one of the first high profile GDPR Subject Access Requests to be carried out in Ireland since the new EU law came into effect in May of this year.

These organisations must now conduct a thorough search of servers, databases, workstations, email account and even cloud storage in order to ensure that no data pertaining to Garda O’Sullivan is missed. This is an extremely arduous and expensive process, and the penalties for missing any relevant information are harsh. However, Ground Labs have created a tool that simplifies this exact process and gives organisation the confidence that they can comply with a SAR to their best ability, and in compliance with the law..

Enterprise Recon can help you to find and remediate sensitive data wherever it is hiding. Our industry leading forensic  data discovery software searches for patterns and matches them against over 200 types of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) as well your full range of PCI data type and shows you not only where this information is, but contextualises what is around it. You also have the ability to configure your own custom data types, because each company and their environment is unique, and Enterprise Recon needs to be as flexible as your organisation is.

Arrange a workshop to see a demonstration of our software, ideally before you get a high profile SAR, and we will be more than happy to show you the powerful sensitive data discovery capabilities of our tools.

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