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Companies complying with the requirements enforced by the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation are experiencing shorter delays in their sales cycle as it relates to customer data and are, on average, experiencing fewer data breaches, according to a recent report published by Cisco.

Robert Waitman, director of data privacy at Cisco, said there are a variety of reasons why companies in compliance with the GDPR are seeing this trend.

“What we've heard from companies that have their data house in order because of GDPR and other previous regulations is that they have taken steps to reduce the number of sensitive assets they have,” Waitman said.

The 2019 Data Privacy Benchmark Survey published by Cisco indicates that a majority of respondents from across the globe, 59 percent, are in full compliance or mostly in compliance with the GDPR. Twenty-nine percent of respondents said they will be ready within the year and 9 percent of respondents said it would take them more than a year to be ready to comply with the GDPR. Three percent of respondents said they do not believe they need to comply with the GDPR.

“Overall, 97 percent of companies feel they need to comply,” Waitman explained. “The fact that the GDPR has such a global reach was striking.”

The report further showed that customer concerns over data privacy issues have put a hold on sales. Eighty-seven percent of companies have indicated that they have had delays in selling to customers because of data privacy concerns. Although the amount of time of those delays has gone down from last year, the delays found in 2018 were, on average, 7.8 weeks while companies experienced sales delays of 3.9 weeks. The average delay for a “GDPR-ready” company is only 3.4 weeks while those not in compliance yet with the GDPR is 5.4 weeks, according to the report.

“Firms are more open and transparent earlier in the sales cycle and they're getting better at answering those GDPR questions from customers,” Waitman said.

The reality is that most companies will experience some kind of data breach. A majority of the companies reported having a data breach in the past year. However, a lower percentage of GDPR-ready companies, only 74 percent, were impacted by data breaches. This is compared to 89 percent of the companies that are least ready for GDPR. Only 37 percent of GDPR-ready companies experienced data breaches that cost over $500,000 in the last year, compared to 64 percent of the least GDPR-ready companies.

The double-blind survey was sent to companies of all sizes across all industries with 3,200 companies from 18 countries responding.