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What is POPIA?

The mandate of South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA, formerly known as PoPI) is to regulate the processing of personal information. With this Act, data breaches need to be reported by law.

Organisations need to develop a clear data protection plan to build trust with customers, drive business growth, and avoid costly penalties.

The Act came in to force on July 1, 2020 with a 1 year grace period within which to ensure compliance.

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How Titus helps organisations meet POPIA compliance

Our data classification solution helps you meet POPIA regulations by discovering, identifying, and classifying emails and files at the point of creation or in on-premise and cloud-based file shares to ensure compliant policy enforcement.

  • Obey legal obligations: Reduce risk and avoidable legal costs.
  • Avoid substantial penalties: Non-compliance can mean up to R10 million fines and/or 12 months in jail.
  • Create a culture of security: Extend security awareness to all systems and processes.
  • Limit reputational damage: Breaches must be disclosed.
  • Prevent client loss: A reputation for breaches could drive away customers and partners.

Proactively delete old data after a reasonable time

Personal information collected and retained by organisations is also subject to deletion.

It can be difficult to guarantee all personal data is deleted if it has been exported to files outside the central database.

The metadata Titus applies to files helps enable staff to locate files that should be deleted for compliance purposes, no matter where they are stored.

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Supporting data subject access requests

Under POPIA, any personal data obtained by an organisation can be subject to access requests.

Anyone has the right to request if a company holds personally identifiable information (PII) on them, what the data is, the reason for collection, and how long the data will be held for.

In many cases, private individuals have the right to request that personal data be deleted from systems in its entirety.

Titus machine learning technologies effectively identify and locate hard-to-find PII in data repositories that include on-premise file shares and popular cloud repositories to take the guesswork out of data subject access requests.

What our thought leaders are saying about POPIA – and what it means for you

Read the blog post by Titus contributor Sean Glansbeek for a deeper dive into the importance of POPIA, what it means for your business, and some tips for POPIA compliance best practices.

Read the full article
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Download the solution brief to learn more about how Titus can help

Learn more about how Titus Classification helps organisations in South Africa meet the compliance requirements of the POPIA Act.

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