The True Cost of Office Productivity Tools

Your office productivity tools may be costing you more than an annual fee. While they offer critical productivity support for communicating and collaborating, for a privacy or security team, they can also generate inefficiencies—and organizational risk—when used as the foundation of a homegrown incident assessment and response system. They simply aren’t purpose-built for event-specific use.

The solution: RadarFirst. Use purpose-built, market-leading incident response solutions to eliminate process and communication inefficiencies, accelerate your speed to notification decisioning, and bring a high level of defensibility to your teams’ incident management approach.

Common Office Productivity Tools:

Office productivity tools are critical to the infrastructure of both individual teams and entire organizations. Some of the most common office productivity tools used by Fortune 500 companies and startups alike include:

• Spreadsheets
• Email
• Shared Document Systems
• Ticketing Systems
• Team Communication Tools

Shared spaces to communicate, collaborate, and manage tasks are among the top benefits for teams when these essential tools are used together—and have become even more valuable in the age of remote work environments. Privacy, compliance, and security teams, however, need more than optimized workflows and shared workspaces to efficiently and effectively respond to data breach incidents.

Challenges to Homegrown Incident Management Systems:

Homegrown incident management systems can be comforting in their familiarity, and are often “the devil we know.” Common barriers to adopting a new solution typically focus on resource constraints, from limited budgets to concerns over intense onboarding timelines. However, when we understand how the challenges to using office productivity tools for building out homegrown incident management systems can potentially add up to costly organizational risk and inefficient use of employee resources, it becomes easy to make the ROI case for investing in a purpose-built incident management solution that collaborates with, and optimizes, already embedded office productivity tools and systems.

Challenges and Consequences

Challenge A: Ever-changing laws and regulations

State, federal, and global privacy and security laws constitute an ever-evolving—and ever-increasing—landscape of regulations that are next to impossible to keep up with using manual processes and tools, such as spreadsheets or documents.

For Privacy teams, the benefits of streamlined communications can yield incredible ROI in risk management: faster time-to-decision and notification are possible with real-time alerts.

Challenge A: Consequences

The potential consequence of using a manual system to maintain a law overview is both the under, or over, notification of regulators, stakeholders, and customers when an incident occurs, either of which can increase fines and penalties, and decrease trust. Additionally, internal resources, or high-priced external counsel, are required to survey laws and update these systems.

Challenge B: Realities of human error and subjectivity

The most dedicated and diligent professionals in an organization are often aligned with the compliance, security, IT, or privacy teams. But, ultimately, humans are humans, prone to error and influenced by subjective thinking. Office productivity tools may offer workflow automation, but they can’t account for the subjective decision-making that remains inherent to a workflow.

Challenge B: Consequences

Subjectivity and simple human error account for many common causes of privacy incidents. For instance, auto-filling the wrong recipient when sending out an email that contains sensitive data. While no solution or tool will ever fully eliminate the possibility of error, automating the incident notification decisioning process, a critical step in the incident management lifecycle, can help reduce the costly consequences of both human error and bad actors.

Challenge C: Scalability of privacy, compliance, & security teams

The demand on compliance, security, and privacy teams is increasing at a rapid pace; they need the ability to scale the pace at which they operate, potentially without added headcount, and their digital footprint with ease and speed. While individual office productivity tools are often easily scalable by adding additional users, tight budgets might prevent hiring. These tools also don’t significantly scale a team’s efficiency and effectiveness in an essential aspect of their roles: incident management.

Challenge C: Consequences

When a critical team, like privacy or security, can’t appropriately scale their efforts to meet organizational needs and regulatory or consumer expectations, the consequences can have a costly impact on the organization’s bottom line, from loss of trust to fines and penalties for under-notifying regulators and stakeholders about breaches, or even a simple delay in notification. And, let’s not forget the human cost as employees are required to work longer hours.

Challenge D: Not event-specific

Office productivity tools, from email to spreadsheets, offer essential collaboration opportunities but are passive solutions for communication and data gathering and do not support the event-driven demands of teams involved in privacy, security, and compliance-based incident management and response.

Challenge D: Consequences

Event-focused teams that rely on manual systems built on office productivity tools are at a much higher risk of over- or under-notifying regulators and stakeholders than teams that have embedded purpose-built, automated solutions into their work. The consequences of both under and over notifications can be costly, to the tune of millions, in fees and fines—as well as the loss of customer trust, the cost of which can have years or decades long impacts on an organization’s bottom line.

Challenge E: Event audits or recalls

It’s not uncommon for data incidents that occurred years ago to be called into question, whether through an audit or legal action.

Challenge E: Consequences

Office productivity tools require compliance, privacy, or security teams to review years of emails, looking for keywords, and then piecing together a comprehensible story from the email narratives. This time-consuming process is certainly error-prone, as teams are likely to miss important content, particularly under tight time constraints.

Challenge F: Inconsistencies inherent in manual processes

Manual, homegrown processes, particularly those built on top of office productivity tools, are inherently inconsistent because they rely on human decision-making rather than automation and technology to follow and complete steps.

Challenge F: Consequences

A critical measure of an effective and risk-mitigating incident management solution is consistency, i.e., defensibility. Without automated incident management solutions that drive forward the digital transformation of key organizational teams, such as privacy, compliance, and security, proper documentation of incident assessments cannot be assured—and an organization’s defensibility of their notification decision-making process may be called into question by regulators and stakeholders when the inevitable privacy or security incident occurs.

Enter RadarFirst

RadarFirst offers a purpose-built incident management solution that addresses privacy, security, and compliance incident assessment and notification decisioning via patented technology and streamlined automation.

The Radar platform offers two award-winning products to drive the digital transformation of security, privacy, compliance, and IT teams.

Radar Privacy

Radar Privacy, powered by the patented Radar Breach Guidance Engine, provides automated risk quantification to expedite breach notification decision-making. The solution automates the privacy risk assessment and immediately solves the most complex questions after a breach occurs:

1. Does this breach require us to notify regulators or affected individuals?
2. What is our risk of harm analysis for each jurisdiction or region?
3. How much time do we have to meet our breach notification obligations? Radar® Privacy enables an exhaustive investigation that ensures all critical details from an incident are captured, and automatically and seamlessly connects that critical data to the appropriate breach notification laws.

Compliance, privacy, and security teams need automated solutions designed to address a critical moment in an incident lifecycle: incident assessment and notification decisioning.

And they need that solution to collaborate with and add additional value to their already embedded office productivity tools to ensure greater efficiency, fewer risks, and consistent, streamlined processes.

Radar Privacy enables an exhaustive investigation that ensures all critical details from an incident are captured, and automatically and seamlessly connects that critical data to the appropriate breach notification laws.

Radar Compliance

Radar Compliance is a configurable rules-and-assessment engine. The solution enables organizations to define their own notification triggers and obligations to stakeholders, from federal regulators to the board of directors. Highly configurable, Radar® Compliance can address a wide variety of incidents, including, but not limited to, cyber events, health and welfare, operational interruptions, and internal compliance.

By operationalizing compliance, risk, and cyber requirements with their associated internal and external notification obligations, Radar Compliance shortens the time spent getting
to a notification decision, freeing up resources for incident investigation and providing a transparent process to all stakeholders. The result is a company-wide streamlined compliance process that enables cross-functional collaboration and risk mitigation between IT, InfoSec, cybersecurity, privacy, legal, HR, and compliance teams.

Integrations with Office Productivity Tools

Radar integrations with Office productivity tools and collaboration are the key to mitigating organizational risk, not only between teams, but between tools, platforms, and solutions. Radar® integrates seamlessly with a growing number of office productivity tools, including:

• Slack
• Microsoft Teams
• IMAP (e.g., Gmail, Outlook)
• CSV Uploads
• Jira
• BambooHR

Use Case

Loss of Electronic and Paper Information

While out to dinner on a Friday evening, a key financial employee of a B2C business left their backpack in a parked car. The backpack contained a computer with downloaded files and paper reports, both of which revealed the personal information of customers and employees. The car window is smashed, and the backpack is stolen.

When the employee discovers the theft upon their return to their parked car, they call law enforcement to report the crime. The employee also sends an email to “[email protected]” via an IMAP integration with Radar® Privacy, including key incident information and pictures of the initial police report and the car window. The employee received a confirmation email that the incident was indeed received by the Radar platform and, therefore, in the hands of the privacy team. Additionally, the privacy team received an alert via Microsoft Teams of the created incident to ensure the investigation and assessment process would not be delayed until the privacy team returned on Monday morning.

The affected company’s Microsoft Teams and IMAP email integrations with Radar Privacy enabled timely data incident reporting that would otherwise have been delayed for several days over the weekend. And thanks to the patented Radar Breach Guidance Engine, the privacy team was able to swiftly determine whether to notify regulators and within what timeframe.

Previously, a similar incident may have taken privacy teams weeks to identify, investigate, and assess, and may have required significant guidance from outside counsel. The collaborative integration of office productivity tools with RadarFirst’s automated incident management products accelerated the team’s breach resolution, from discovery to notification, ensuring the appropriate stakeholders were notified, within the required timeframe, and only as required by law, safeguarding the organization’s trust, reputation, and their bottom line.

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