Data GovErnance For SupportiNg GDPR (DeFEND)

DEFeND was an international partnership that aimed to deliver a platform to empower organisations in different sectors to assess and comply to The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), increasing their maturity in different aspects of GDPR.

The rapid advances in ICT had raised the need to adapt to this progress for organisations (pushing them towards e-services and increase their efficiency), public authorities (stimulating new services to citizens and reducing complexity) and individuals (enabling them to communicate personal information more efficiently). 

DEFeND (a title devised from the phrase Data Governance for Supporting GDPR) would deliver a platform which enabled building and analysing models. It would follow a Privacy-by-Design approach spanning over two levels - the planning level and the operational level - and across three management areas: Data Scope, Data Process and Data Breach.

The consortium would leverage existing software, tools and methodologies towards the implementation of the platform software components. The DEFeND platform would be tested in living labs pilots, involving partners from four European Union countries in four different areas: healthcare, banks, energy and local public administration. It would be tested in an operational environment (TRL 7) in three different scenarios across two different types, focusing on the GDPR compliance process for end-users and on the GDPR implications for external stakeholders.

Driven by the lack of appropriate products in the market, the DEFeND exploitation strategy was based on commercialisation of project results at three levels: platform-as-a-whole, fragments of the platform and partners’ individual exploitation. This strategy will enable partners to integrate the results into their existing commercial offerings, exploring and establishing new business opportunities.The exploitation strategy would focus on four areas: Sector Specific Exploitation, Networking, Exploitation Meetings and Community-building around the project. The exploitation strategy would be integrated and supported by dissemination activities throughout the project.

This Project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 787068.

The main aim of the DEFeND project was to deliver an innovative data privacy governance platform, which would facilitate scoping and processing of data and data breach management and will support organisations towards GDPR compliance.