The Regulatory Burden
The hospitality industry thrives on data. Data that you use to better understand customer behavior and anticipate customer needs.
The desire to use this data to create convenient, self-service options (automated check-in, room entry by smartphone, etc) can improve the guest experience but also increases complexity for your business.
From booking a reservation, to drinks at the bar, and treatments at the spa, credit card data of each guest is essential. Even the hotel wi-fi can be used to access guest devices such as mobile phones, tablets and laptops. This valuable information has been disclosed in numerous cyber security breaches at well known brands such as Marriott and MGM Grand in recent years.
To manage this complexity and its implications on cyber security, data privacy and compliance, some help from a GRC management platform — one that provides a unified, real-time view of risk and compliance — can help you stay ahead of threats, protect you from non-compliance and drive efficiency through automation.
A Framework for Data Privacy Success
In the process of serving customers, you are likely to collect a variety of information including, Personal Identifiable Information (PII), sensitive financial information, customer behavior data and preferred customer data like IDs, passwords and location data.
All of that data is subject to protection from multiple data privacy laws, not to mention the cybersecurity and quality standards that impact this industry. Examples include:
Thus, organizations in the hospitality industry must be prepared, with a robust compliance and risk management program in order to meet their cybersecurity and regulatory compliance requirements.
Manage Compliance and Risk with Confidence and Ease
While many smaller organizations begin managing compliance and risk through manual efforts and legacy tools and spreadsheets, this is not sustainable long term.
The RiskOptics ROAR Platform is a risk and compliance management solution that leverages automation functionality, universal control mapping and real-time monitoring to streamline data governance, risk management, and compliance requirements for hospitality companies.
The RiskOptics software solution empowers you to accomplish your risk and compliance goals faster and with greater accuracy, ensuring that data is protected and customer satisfaction and trust are sustained.
Compliance Objectives
As you can see, hospitality businesses can leverage multiple frameworks to achieve their data privacy, cybersecurity and quality assurance compliance objectives.
But regardless of the compliance framework, the business will have to track risk assessments, perform gap analyses and conduct remediation efforts. This can quickly get too cumbersome to manage manually.
That’s where the RiskOptics ROAR Platform can help with automation, reporting features and guidance to empower hospitality organizations to:
- Encrypt all payment card data
- Map all sensitive data to the systems, processes, and people who access it to ensure you know where your vulnerabilities are and fortify them
- Limit access to sensitive information to only those who must have it to do their jobs
- Continuously monitor compliance stance across all frameworks that apply to the scope of your business
- Get real-time risk scores to surface hidden and changing risk to your organization
- Quantify and convey the impact of risk on key aspects of your business to stakeholders
Ready to See Risk Differently?
The RiskOptics ROAR Platform gives you the ability to see, understand and take action on your IT and cyber risks.
Sign up for a Free DemoFrequently Asked Questions
Do I need a data retention policy?
A data retention policy is important for hospitality organizations as they must make certain they have retained the right data, properly disposed of the data they don’t need, and have proper data backup policies.
If the hospitality organization doesn’t back up the right amount of data, disaster recovery won’t be effective. On the other hand, backing up too much data may cause confusion and delay the recovery process.
How can a hospitality organization ensure GDPR compliance?
A great starting point for hospitality organizations is to begin with an audit of your hotel website. Identify where data is requested on the website. For each of these areas, you must ensure that you have clearly outlined your data use policy for site visitors to see.
Your data use policies must observe the following consumer rights:
- The right to be informed
- The right to access/modify data
- The right to give/withdraw consent
- The right for data erasure
- The right to transfer data
How does GRC software help me protect my sensitive data?
To protect your info systems and data from unauthorized access or theft, you must first understand what gaps, if any, exist in your security protocols as well as the unique risks facing your organization.
Then, once your risks are assessed and mitigated, your compliance or cybersecurity program will need to be maintained, monitored, and reviewed routinely to ensure that internal controls are still effective and that you are aware of emerging risks.
With compliance and security frameworks built-in and maintained by experts along with suggested risk and threat scores and real-time connections between control assessments and risk scoring, you get a unified, real-time view of risk and compliance and significant efficiency gains so that you can stay ahead of threats, reduce risk and strengthen compliance.
How can the NIST Cybersecurity Framework help hospitality organizations implement GDPR data protocols?
The NIST Cybersecurity Framework can be used to provide additional paths toward tackling GDPR data privacy objectives through its “Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond and Recover” principles. As GDPR is so broad, the NIST CF provides a holistic approach to security so your organization can accelerate its GDPR compliance journey.
