Data privacy has assumed center stage in the realm of corporate governance. But keeping data private presents today's global businesses with assorted obstacles:

• Sensitive business, customer, and employee information can cross borders in an instant – often finding its way to partners, contractors, and distributors in the company's complex global network.
• Data breaches can be caused not just by hackers and thieves but by employees who are unaware of their own company's or country's privacy policies.
• Data privacy regulations often vary across countries, regions, and even states and cities.

As privacy regulations increase, demonstrating compliance is becoming more difficult – and more expensive. A study by AMR Research predicts the cost of compliance to reach $33.5 billion by 2009. Businesses need a reliable way to create and enforce global and local compliance policies across the entire business network. Typical compliance solutions have created information silos, developed in response to specific regulations and lacking any global control or network-wide, real-time prevention mechanism – until now.

Enforce Data Privacy Across Your Business Network

The Data Privacy composite application by SAP and Cisco enables businesses to proactively enforce global and local data privacy policies throughout their extended enterprise. This best-in-class solution combines real-time communication and intelligent network services from Cisco with SAP's governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) functionality. It allows businesses to establish compliance policies and controls, and discover and resolve violations as they happen.

Jointly developed by Cisco and SAP, the Data Privacy composite application can help organizations reduce liability, business disruption, and incidents of compromised data. Now, your company can manage risk more effectively while demonstrating continuous compliance.

The Data Privacy composite application enables your business to:

• Enforce data privacy – Establish global and local controls and proactively enforce them throughout the extended enterprise. Identify incidents in real time with intelligent network monitoring. Achieve rapid issue remediation and resolution through policy controls and real-time collaboration.
• Manage business risk – Effectively manage the risk of regulatory violations, business policy violations, negative public exposure, and loss of shareholder confidence due to data breaches.
• Demonstrate continuous compliance – Gain the unique ability to align business policy with real-time enforcement, and create reports to verify end-to-end compliance.