If you’re a privacy professional, Portland in August is the place to be. Earlier this month, our team had the pleasure of hosting privacy and legal professionals from domestic and global companies obligated to consumer data protection obligations at our 2nd annual RADAR User Summit.

Amid the three days of interactive workshops, a privacy visionary keynote, best-practice sharing, and phenomenal networking, it was our privilege to present USAA the inaugural Kevin Padrick Privacy Excellence Award, in recognition of USAA’s culture of innovation and collaboration with RADAR for many years. Our partnership with USAA privacy team has been instrumental in the advancement of innovative capabilities of our industry leading incident response platform. Michael Davis, manager senior of privacy at USAA, accepted the award on USAA’s behalf.

About the Kevin Padrick Privacy Excellence Award

The Kevin Padrick Privacy Excellence Award, founded in 2019, is named in honor of Kevin Padrick, past RADAR chairman of the Board and investor, a gifted attorney, entrepreneur, and serial innovator who founded or co-founded more than ten companies. Kevin served in several leadership roles both in and out of the boardroom, as a member of the board of directors of RADAR, ID Experts, Castor and Pollux, and various banks and bank holding companies, and as a Commissioner of the Crater Lake Council, Boy Scouts of America. In honor of Kevin’s legacy, award recipients are considered and selected based on their commitment to innovation, operational excellence, and leadership in service to the privacy profession and community.

We pride ourselves in being highly collaborative and responsive to our customers’ needs. USAA is a long-standing RADAR customer who has closely collaborated with our product team, helping RADAR evolve into the award-winning platform it is today. Their commitment to innovation and pursuit of operational excellence in incident response management has contributed to our continuous development of new, innovative features —functionality that the entire RADAR user community benefits from today and into the future. We’re proud to serve the strategic and operational needs of USAA’s privacy team.

Below are a few of my personal highlights from this exceptional event:

Hands-on Sessions, Globally-Minded Keynote

I was absolutely thrilled to have our customers take center stage during certain sessions. In one popular session, a panel of RADAR customers discussed the intersection of privacy, security, and legal concerns. Another session featured a live customer case study on operational benchmarking within the privacy program. Benchmarking helps drive continuous process improvements at the departmental, executive, board, and regulator levels. These customers demonstrated a dedication to the continued growth of the community in their openness to sharing best practices, and their willingness to bring open minds and professional expertise to the speaking podium.

Pam Dixon, founder and executive director of the World Privacy Forum, delivered the keynote address. She discussed the global landscape of privacy, based on her domestic and international work and research, including:

• A global perspective on breach and data protection
• The changing philosophy of privacy
• Best practices on proving and documenting compliance with privacy regulations

She reinforced the inevitability of a data privacy or security incident for today’s organizations. “If you have data, you will have a data breach,” she said. “End of discussion, it’s just going to happen.” The presentation ended with a call to arms, for privacy professionals to develop standards for the industry and set protocols for what constitutes a truly stellar privacy program.

Proud to be RADAR

Thanks to our RADAR customers, we had an amazing and productive annual user summit. We set out creating this year’s event with the goal of facilitating deeper conversations, fostering personal and professional relationships among incident response leaders, and continuing to grow our community of RADAR users. We are proud to have brought together an amazing group of privacy pioneers, and look forward to reuniting at next year’s summit here in beautiful Portland, Oregon.