The Institute of Strategic Dialogue: Data Protection Audit
The Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD) is a group of independent, non-profit organisations dedicated to safeguarding human rights and reversing polarisation, extremism and disinformation worldwide.
ISD’s research combines world-leading expertise in these fields with the latest artificial intelligence and online research techniques, analysing data across social media at speed and scale; and consequently, processing large volumes of personal data.
Aiming to take a best practice approach to data protection and in light of its global operations, ISD asked AWO to undertake a data protection audit for the organisation.
What we achieved
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Discovery & audit
The first stage involved a discovery and audit of global operations across the UK, US and more. With complicated and international data flows, this work was significantly complex.
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Review
The second stage involved documentary review of all data protection related policies (both internal staff facing and external), an analysis of the organisational structure and undertaking stakeholder interviews. This then enabled our team to understand and assess the data protection framework that was currently in place and identify areas for improvement.
We then drafted a data protection roadmap which set out recommendations for the organisation to implement to achieve enhanced compliance across its global operations.
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Implementation
The final stage involved implementing the recommendations provided by AWO in its audit report. To do this, we offered a secondment arrangement for the client which enabled us to operationalise and action compliance on a continued basis for the client and put into place processes and policies that are tailored for and work for the client.
This approach meant that ISD has benefited from a single focal point of contact for this ongoing work. Our flexibility in how we deliver our services involved sitting alongside ISD (both through the discovery and audit stage, and now with the secondment ongoing retainer stage) to understand its actual processing operations and challenges. This has enabled us to operationalise and action compliance on a continued basis for the client.