PDPA Implementation in Singapore Driving New Employment
Singpaore’s new Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) will be coming into force on 2nd July of this year. For anyone not yet up to date on the topic the PDPA site explains the act as, “The PDPA will ensure a baseline standard of protection for personal data across the economy by complementing sector-specific legislative and regulatory frameworks. This means that organisations will have to comply with the PDPA as well as the common law and other relevant laws that are applied to the specific industry that they belong to, when handling personal data in their possession.”
This act will cover all forms of personal data weather true or not that could be used to identify a user, and will be comprised of a number of different governing rulers to regulate the collection, use, disclosure and care of all personal data
Breaches of this act could lead to fines of up to a million dollars depending on the types of privacy. The general feelings amongst CIO’s in Singapore are more leaning towards blaming third party hackers for the miss use of personal data. ZDNet reported that 65 percent of CIOs in Singapore believe security risks are the biggest problem with cloud. They also feel that another significant concern amongst CIO’s are the new legal ramifications for a privacy breach within their cloud storage of personal customer data.
This fear has started to drive a large employment push of cloud security experts to implement the necessary security changes before the PDPA act is enforced and thereby avoid the penalties.
Stella Tang, Director of Robert Half Singapore said “Recent examples of privacy breaches in Singapore have put CIOs on high alert about cloud security. That’s why we are seeing more demand for security experts as companies seek to strengthen their IT team in order to protect their data.”
This employment boom is great news for security experts, not only is it an increase in job openings but it will also have salary implications for all employees in the field. Tang continued, “It is logical that demand for IT security experts is increasing at the same time the perception of threats is increasing. And this increased demand is leading to higher salaries for suitably qualified IT professionals, who can expect substantial increases when changing jobs,”
