POPI or the Protection of Personal Information Act is coming. We are not sure when or how, but coming it is and businesses of all sizes need to be ready and compliant or face the consequences.

Now I am sure that you will join in with the millions of others and just brush it off as yet another Act from the government that will not be implemented and if it is, it will never be enforced. And Yes, I agree with a lot of that, but the POPI act does give us some good guidelines as to how we should be running our businesses and how we need to and should be handling the sensitive data of our staff and clients.

So I would suggest that you either enroll in one of those expensive courses that are currently being run by all sorts of people across the country of doing some research for yourself and find out exactly what you and your firm are in for before you spend any money.

We are on this quest and doing a bunch of reading, listening, and research to find out exactly what small businesses need to do and be to become compliant. This we will share here and on various webinars over the next few months. So you can relax a bit and read these articles or do your own research.

What we have learned so far is this: There is nothing that needs to be done now: so relax. If you are just a normal business with client lists, a mailing list, and some backups: there is very little to do other than firm up your business processes and maybe write a document or two. If you are in the mass market with many different types of lists, marketing platforms or if you manage people’s sensitive information such as financial or health data: then you need to do a whole bunch more.

This serves just as an initial warning to put POPI on your radar for the next 6 months as an investigation then later for some form of implementation.  If you want to add to this or learn more then, please contact us on this website and we would love to engage with you and chat further. POPI goes well with Coffee.