4.19.18
SkyKick, a global provider of cloud management software for information technology (IT) solution partners, announced today that it has completed the necessary steps for compliance with the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy regulations, providing a critical piece for cloud IT partners racing to meet the May 25, 2018 deadline. Specifically, SkyKick has put the necessary auditing and compliance controls in place to provide a GDPR-compliant data processing agreement for partners. The company has also appointed Gerard Doeswijk as its European Data Protection Officer (DPO) and has formally registered his appointment with the Dutch Data Protection Authority.
“SkyKick is continually focused on enabling IT partners to grow their cloud business,” said SkyKick Vice President of International Eric Jewett. “As the data processor, SkyKick takes on the lion’s share of the compliance burden, so cloud IT partners wrestling with their own GDPR compliance have one less thing to worry about. They can instead focus on building a more profitable cloud business.”
Based on SkyKick’s ongoing GDPR-readiness assessments, the company became GDPR-compliant in February and has been working since then to further solidify its data and privacy controls beyond the letter of the law. In Microsoft’s most recent partner detailed GDPR assessment, SkyKick reached an advanced score putting it clearly in the “Optimizing” category. This is a result of a fundamental transformation that the company undertook early on to weave “privacy by design” as a core tenet into its technology, operations and partner engagement business processes.
SkyKick has also updated its privacy policy and is ready to provide a GDPR-compliant data processing agreement for partners. In close cooperation with the company’s strategic partners and a world leading audit firm, SkyKick is establishing an internal audit function and making further investments in both hard and soft controls in support of its certification for relevant ISO and SOC2 standards.
As SkyKick’s new Data Protection Officer, Gerard Doeswijk will represent partners’ data protection needs and rights in SkyKick’s data processing workflow, as well as support ongoing engagement with regulators around data protection matters. Doeswijk brings over two decades of business and engineering experience in the Microsoft ecosystem. The appointment and registration of a dedicated DPO is another important milestone in the GDPR compliance journey that SkyKick started in January 2017. It is a testament to SkyKick’s commitment to data privacy as a fundamental human right, the company’s ability to proactively self-regulate in this important area, and its priority to support the business needs of IT Partners.
“We are keen to provide our partners with information and assets to support compliance efforts for their business and their customers’ businesses related to GDPR,” continued SkyKick’s Jewett. As part of that campaign, SkyKick continues to drive ongoing, cross-company efforts to finalize GDPR readiness for partners as they approach May 25, the date GDPR goes into effect.
