Genetec, a technology provider of unified security, public safety, operations, and business intelligence solutions, is urging North American security directors to get ready for the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

While the initiative is led by the European Union, the territorial scope of the GDPR is global. As of May 25, 2018, any business that is collecting or storing personally identifiable information of EU citizens (including surveillance video, cardholder information and activities tracked by an access control system, and license plate numbers captured by an automatic license plate recognition system) will be held accountable, regardless of where the organization is based. This includes any business with offices, stores, warehouses, websites, employees or customers in the EU. 

Should a security breach occur that impacts personally identifiable information, companies will be mandated to report it within 72 hours. Failure to comply with these new regulations could result in up to 20 million Euros in penalties ($25 million), or 4 percent of the company’s global annual turnover, whichever is higher. 

“With the deadline nearing, and heavy penalties looming, North American organizations, from big multi-national retail chains to small and medium-sized businesses, are seeking strategies that will make them compliant across all their data collection processes, as simply and cost-effectively as possible. At ISC West, we will be engaging our customers and partners in discussions about how to best achieve compliance,” said Christian Morin, vice president cloud services and chief security officer at Genetec. 

At ISC West, Genetec will showcase on-premises and SaaS end-to-end solutions that can help organizations achieve GDPR compliance with regard to processing operations of video surveillance data. As a trusted partner, Genetec reported, it can provide organizations with valuable insight into the extent of their GDPR obligations and on how best to design and develop their video, access control and ALPR systems to meet compliance requirements. 

Of particular interest to ISC West attendees will be the latest version of Security Center which now comes with the KiwiVision Privacy Protector module, to enable organizations to automatically blur and mask video surveillance footage, and anonymize people to protect their privacy. Privacy Protector was recently certified for the fourth consecutive term with the European Privacy Seal (EuroPriSe), and is rated GDPR-ready. Privacy Protector is the only privacy protecting video solution to hold this certification, the company reported.