The benefits of outsourcing your DPO function

Why are you outsourcing the data protection officer’s work? 

Usually, there are several reasons simultaneously at work:

• lack of team’s knowledge about the privacy regulations and best practices; 
• the team is too small or overly engaged in creating products and delivering services to work on privacy-related issues; 
• language or culture barrier, especially in case of complying with the laws of the target market;
• expenses compared to hiring a full-time in-house specialist; 
• the necessity to demonstrate that the DPO has no conflict of interest (in case of highly data-dependent or sensitive data-driven startups); 
• [big corporate] client’s demand to have a DPO designated; or even  
• access to the industry’s best practices and experience of similar businesses. 

These are just a handful of examples. Every business has its own set of reasons to turn to a data protection firm instead of expanding its core team – they even may have a privacy expert in-house and still hire a data protection officer as a service to replace a dedicated back office! 

Benefit 1: expanding the reach of your in-house specialist 

Compliance is no easy task. So many things are happening at the same time. Just imagine you alone trying to keep an eye on and document everything related to:

• new AI-based product rollout, 
• media campaign sparked by a concerned social media user about your allegedly risky privacy practices, 
• testing new features on real user’s data (is it legal even?), 
• data subject requests referring to a few data protection laws at once; 
• undergoing three separate vendor assessment checks by prospective corporate clients, 
• training your team’s newcomers on the GDPR basics, 
• answering your vendors’ questions about your data processing agreement clauses, and even 
• automating the risk assessment process as a part of your internal development team. 

It may sound like a nightmare for your attention span, doesn’t it? Luckily, at this stage of the company’s maturity, there is a trained employee to take care of these processes. But they are still limited by two very important resources: eyes and hands (the physical ability to focus on the task at hand and close it effectively) and time. 

An outsourced DPO helps increase the number of hands and eyes (by engaging their own team of experts) and parallel the processes (by taking over part of the backlog). 

Benefit 2: listening to the best industry practices  

Data protection firms, especially professional DPO-as-a-service providers, are working on many projects simultaneously. Many of their experts were previously in-house privacy experts who decided to focus on specific tasks such as risk assessments, privacy by design, or automation of data subject request handling procedures. 

This field is also popular with legal professionals who switched to working with technology after completing law school and working as corporate advisors for several years. Thus, they have both legal skills (such as reading regulations and predicting enforcement steps) and tech-induced creativity and problem-solving skills. 

Data protection specialists: 

• love diving into details, 
• have the patience to read hundreds of pages of regulators’ guidelines produced every week, 
• remember about their NDAs while discussing the challenges with their fellow data protection specialists, 
• spot ideas of compliance steps undertaken by other software producers and share them with the team or add them to their toolkit, 
• eagerly review media reports, industry scandals and initiatives, and recent fines issued by the regulators, and often 
• engage in creating the data protection guidelines and laws as committee experts. 

Thus, given that data protection officers are usually unwilling to stay in-house, hiring a data protection firm amplifies your business’s cumulative experience and skill set. 

Benefit 3: backing up your compliance in times of change 

Data protection specialists in firms work together. Even if they dedicate one among them to be your primary contact, they usually have a pool of middle-level staff and a senior-level buddy to help them perform tasks and achieve results. These back-office talents are knowledgeable of your project, have experience working with other senior specialists on other projects, and are often more than capable of taking over a project if the main representative is suddenly unavailable. You’ll be informed if anything happens, and the firm will propose a replacement candidate. 

Where you would have to wait for your in-house specialist to return after a sick leave, vacation, or study program, your outsourced DPO is always here if something urgent needs to be done, often without decreasing service quality. 

Benefit 4: costs and scopes can be tailored to your needs 

If you decide to switch to another market, develop a new heavily regulated product, or sell a part of your business, you can always return to your DPO. 

For example:

• sign a separate contract to cover the purchased part of the business to ensure that the product remains compliant while the management is being changed; 
• decrease the number of hours necessary to comply with the applicable laws or even terminate the contract without detrimental consequences of firing an employee; 
• change the scope of the service and receive rare expertise at the cost of a regular service; 
• add the new compliance scope to your current program without the necessity to spend months onboarding an in-house privacy expert, etc. 

If everything is kept in-house, all of these considerations may involve a lot of drama. However, an outsourced DPO may be as effective as an internal one and spare you the headache of repurposing your resources or re-educating your employees to fit your organization’s privacy-related needs. 

If you have any other benefit in mind that would suit you better than the four mentioned above, let us know. Here at Privacity, we look forward to applying our expertise where it is effective and to the extent necessary to protect your business from any risks that result from a lack of time, effort, skill or training.