Silwood Technology Ltd, a U.K.-based supplier of enterprise application metadata intelligence software, has announced the availability of a GDPR Starter Pack for SAP to give users of the ERP software a kick-start in identifying the precise location of personal data fields in any SAP system.
According to the company, research conducted by the UK & Ireland SAP User Group shows 86% of SAP users do not fully understand how GDPR will affect their SAP landscapes and how to reach compliance.
A critical starting point for any GDPR strategy is the location of personal information and determining if and where some or all of that data may lie in a large application package like SAP can become a significant task.
The GDPR Starter Pack is underpinned by Safyr, a dedicated metadata discovery software product that enables users to access, understand, share and utilize the underlying data structures for SAP applications.
As an example, says Silwood, the attribute “birth” may occur many times in an SAP system which contains over 90,000 tables. Using Safyr in a recent client engagement, a customer was able to find all occurrences of the Personal Data string “birth” across all tables and fields in an SAP system in under 5 minutes and that information then could be delivered to metadata and data governance platforms for further exploitation.
To simplify the “discovery” process, Silwood Technology is announcing the first in a series ofs. “Starter Packs” for ERP/CRM packages that take the hard work out of identifying these fields.
The first starter pack is for SAP, since the scope and range of potential personal information in SAP is very broad. Silwood aims to make the process of finding these “Personal Data” fields easier by developing processes to seek them out, record them and make them available in a useful form. Customers who use Silwood’s Safyr application for SAP can receive the Starter Pack free of charge.
The Starter Pack comprises a set of Safyr Subject Areas that describe and identify each type of personal information, such as zip codes, dates of birth, license plates. A Safyr Subject Area is a grouping of tables and fields that a customer can overlay on the metadata extracted from their own customized SAP system so they can see which tables and fields are important to GDPR.
What constitutes personal data will vary by industry, and the Safyr user can combine these Subject Areas into other groups that form the consolidated set of fields for their company and requirements, as well as their own fields in customized SAP systems.
Silwood will be releasing similar starter packs for the other packages in the near future.
For more information, go to www.silwoodtechnology.com.