GDPR - turn your compliance costs into an investment
Next year in May, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come to effect, threatening to charge fines of up to 20 million euros for organizations that fail to be compliant.
If you only just found out about GDPR, don’t panic, there’s still time to get your business in compliance with the new rules. But you should not push dealing with this issue any further into the future as you have less than 300 business days left to become compliant. The sooner you begin your journey, the better. There is no better time than now to get a move on.
Here are Nortal’s 10 tips on how to avoid the fine and how to see this development as an opportunity.
Four things to consider before building a new IT system
Although the digitalization of paperwork in recent decades has been relentless, the hope that it will boost productivity and make document management cheaper has not always been realized. Is there a universal list of things to consider before building a new digital registry?
Global standards on medical data, security and privacy to facilitate precision medicine
To successfully implement precision medicine in practice, healthcare providers require data of superior quality, believes Taavi Einaste, Nortal’s head of digital healtchare. To guarantee better data, global standards on collecting medical data should be established.
Sucker punch: sensitive data breaches in document registries are a commonplace
Several municipalities in Estonia received a rude awakening recently, when they realized their public document registers contained very sensitive personal information about people’s disabilities, social benefits decisions or addresses, all easily accessible for anybody who took an interest. Without Nortal’s new document scanner it would have taken them hours, if not days of manual labor to find the breaches.
Warning: your shower is spying on you!
When you flush the toilet, do you ever stop to wonder what this reveals about yourself to your water provider? In his master’s thesis, Mihkel Kasepuu, a Java developer at Nortal, shows that maybe you should.
Transforming transportation systems for smarter ports and cities
Besides changing vehicles and how we direct them (think about self-driving cars), technology is also transforming city transport infrastructures, forcing them to become an integral part of any smart city.
Sustainable development through digital transformation
When creating architectures for government solutions, it is important to design for the purpose of building and reusing the knowledge rather than just building another legacy system.
The 10 Commandments for ethical software testers
Working with software gives developers and testers access to confidential and privileged information, and therefore at times this information might present ethical issues for the people building the software or testing it. Although I am lucky that I cannot recall a single similar example from my own experience, dealing with increasing amounts of confidential material could raise questions for testers about the ethicality of some projects or software.
Nortal issued bonds for 15 million euros to boost expansion
The 15 million euro bond issue of Nortal, the multinational strategic change and technology company, which was fully subscribed by renowned institutional investors, will support the rapid growth of the business and be used for refinancing the existing obligations. Bonds were issued with five-year maturity and 5 per cent coupon rate.
Shift in customer journey paves way for new e-commerce solutions
The number of channels used in e-commerce has increased significantly in the past decade, and customer behavior has also changed. People are now moving between different touch-points more than ever before to conclude a purchase.
Want better code? Get your developers testing!
The term Test-Driven Development (or TDD) has been around for a while but its full potential for software development is still not commonly being realized in most IT companies. Although in the beginning, putting it into practice might seem more hassle than it’s worth, its numerous benefits quickly become evident.
System agnosticism assures best results
Data being the new oil, companies that want to have successful sales cycles must adapt to new ways of doing business and monitoring their revenue process. Being a system agnostic partner, Nortal can help successfully create a seamless process that generates and measures revenue.
Bright future ahead – Summer University starts at Nortal
It is that time of a year again when hundreds of well-educated, aspiring minds leave university with highly sought after STEM degrees (science, technology, engineering and math) looking for a place to start their careers. To help them, Nortal’s Summer University opened its doors this morning to 51 young professionals.
A quarter of marketers haven’t even heard of GDPR
Only 20% of sales and marketing managers in Sweden know how to turn the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation’s (GDPR) compliance costs into opportunities, a recent Nortal survey in Sweden shows.
Electronic identity helps attract talent
In the context of skyrocketing numbers of mobile workers, competition between governments to attract the best people is also set to rise. Electronic identity is one way a country can score points in this race.
Empowering designers leads to better societies
Nortal believes better design in products and services leads to a well-functioning society and one way to facilitate such a change is to empower the younger generation.
Who makes a reliable brand ambassador?
What an employee says about a company travels eight times further than what the company says about itself.
According to the 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer, the general public views non-executive company employees as significantly more reliable information sources than the leadership, or even the press representatives of a company.
Pumping ideas for Neste
Envisioning a social network for stakeholders in a sustainable supply chain at Neste Hackathon last week, Nortal’s presentation got the highest remarks for its professionalism and innovative approach.
Becoming an IT genius
Googling, courage to tinker and a fair amount of curiosity about coding is a good way to begin one’s journey to becoming an IT genius, recounts Mihkel Kasepuu, one of Nortal’s Java developers an interview with Estonian daily Äripäev.
New era in data protection: Are we ready?
It is an indisputable fact that data is the new “black gold” and hard currency of the digital era. In one year, a new General Data Protection Regulation will become applicable. This is an updated EU-wide data protection legislation introducing substantial changes that directly affect all companies and authorities. One year before the new regulation becomes applicable it is appropriate to ask: Are we ready?
Building communities makes companies stronger
Believe that it’s a luxury to treat your people and their extended lives well and you’ll be out of business in no time. Disengagement is costly, efficiency loss and dysfunctional teams lead to millions of losses in companies’ revenue and in a country’s GDP.