What a big event! With over three hundred and fifty people attending, this was one of the Norfolk Chamber of Commerce’s biggest conference so far to date. The morning was focused on the new guidelines, and changes for the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), which are due to come into force on Friday 25 May 2018. This event was fantastic for the Norfolk Chamber to support the business community, as well as welcome our members and non-members to the conference.
Chris Sargisson our Chief Executive opened the event and throughout the morning the delegates attending heard talks given by; Alex Saunders from Leathes Prior, Tom Parsley from Selesti, John Gostling, Breakwater IT and Daren Chapman from Cyber Scale. Each speaker shared their expert knowledge, business subject area, all of which helped to provide a real insight into GDPR.
Alex Saunders, from Leathes Prior Solicitors, was the first speaker to talk about GDPR. Part of Alex’s professional practice specializes in Data Protection. He gave a really interesting and insightful talk into the current regulations, and the new changes coming into force from the legal point of view. He also covered Lawful Processing, Consent, and the action points we need to consider within all our professional and personal handling of data.
Tom Parsley, Commercial Director at Selesti, talked about the perspective of GDPR and Marketing. He highlighted how the new changes of GDPR should be seen as a positive for all our marketing campaigns. He also discussed how this change can give us all the opportunity to be a more personalized, and humanly engaged with our clients. Like Alex Saunders, Tom also covered Consent, from the marketing viewpoint and how we can increase the trust within our brand image.
John Gosling, Managing Director at Breakwater, was the third speaker who provided a real insight into; what is a breach of personal data. He also gave the audience a range of good examples of how breaches had occurred, and how we need to ensure we can prevent this happening with our own businesses in the future.
Darren Chapman Director and Principal Security Consultant of Cyber Scale was the last speaker of the morning. Darren discussed the importance of why Cyber Security matters and how the GDPR regulations work in practice with cyber security. It was really useful to have some key action points to take away and potentially implement too.
The four speakers in a panel brought the morning to a close with questions and answers from the audience. This was an ideal opportunity to build a further awareness and answer the concerns we all had on GDPR.
It was great to hear such a diversity of speakers throughout the morning and many of our members commented on how the event had given them the confidence to implement the new regulations, as well as confirming their own knowledge on the topic.
However, the event did not stop there! There were two further optional workshops after the main conference. One with Holly Stibbon, Director of 101 ltd on a practical marketing approach to GDPR. This was a really useful workshop focused on clear and practical advice on how to ensure your marketing is answering all the GDPR requirements. Holly also answered questions from the audience with supportive, and sound advice too.
Robert Masson, Chief Executive Officer of the DPO Centre highlighted the importance of appointing a current member of your staff with the role as Data Protection Officer within your business. This was a really valuable workshop and everyone clearly benefited from Robert’s knowledge.
As a useful follow on from the conference we have produced three great podcasts with some of our speakers on GDPR. Please click here for our conference toolkit.
