Automating Privacy Operations: The Next Frontier of Data Privacy

As a privacy practitioner, I know the reality of managing operations on under-resourced privacy teams. My days were filled with reviewing free-form questionnaires for privacy impact assessments (PIAs). Conducting vendor reviews (which stakeholders begrudgingly completed). Attending painstaking meetings to assess database schemas for maintaining data subject request (DSR) processes. Or, performing endless periodic reviews of data shared with third-party advertisers to validate consent behavior. 

Every task felt like an uphill battle—manual, time-consuming, monotonous, and prone to error. I constantly thought: "There has to be a better way." 

The answer: Replace manual processes with automated solutions. This way privacy professionals can shift their focus to more proactive and strategic initiatives, setting their programs up for long-term success. 

The Evolving Privacy Landscape

The privacy challenge continues to grow in terms of risk and responsibilities. Of course, there are legal and regulatory updates, such as eight new privacy laws in the United States in 2025. Additionally, businesses are leaning into emerging technologies. On one hand, the AI boom is revolutionizing enterprises, but it’s also introducing new governance responsibilities. Privacy professionals may now be directly involved with ensuring new AI products and services adhere to existing data protection requirements. 

These developments amplify the cracks in manual privacy processes. Relying on spreadsheets, static questionnaires, messaging platforms, and point-in-time assessments is no longer sustainable. 

Privacy programs need solutions that provide continuous visibility, adaptability, and scalability.

The Challenges of Manual Privacy Operations

Building a Data Inventory

‍To effectively reduce privacy risk, privacy teams need a clear understanding of where their data is within their organization. However, uncovering this information often requires sending out questionnaires and facilitating meetings—only to tediously create visual data maps that are already outdated by the time they’re finished. Stakeholders often delay completing forms or reschedule meetings, making this exercise even more cumbersome and frustrating. Alternatively, you may have a tool that assists with data classifications, but it relies on outdated methods such as regular expressions (regex) or manual tuning. Or you may have a tool with a polished user interface, but it simply replicates the work you’re doing in spreadsheets. 

The ideal scenario? Automate data mapping efforts to create and maintain a living inventory of context-rich personal information, continuously updated as your organization's personal data ecosystem evolves. This approach gives privacy professionals confidence that their data inventory remains current, reducing the need for manual updates and freeing them to tackle other privacy program tasks.

Implementing Privacy Controls

‍You know the drill: Stakeholders fill out free-form questionnaires for privacy impact or vendor assessments. Privacy professionals then analyze the information, document the results, and implement controls, such as updating notices or implementing consent mechanisms. Any future changes depend on stakeholders proactively informing the privacy team, leaving room for critical gaps as business practices rapidly evolve and personnel changes eliminate institutional knowledge to follow established governance processes.

So what’s the answer? There’s a need to establish privacy monitoring by replacing administrative paper controls with automated technical controls, defining policies specific to your organization’s processing activities and flagging deviations for analysis in real-time.

Managing Daily Operations

‍Privacy professionals are stuck jumping from one assessment or meeting to the next, documenting controls and decisions. They have little to no time to step back and think strategically about enhancing privacy operations. This leaves them with little confidence that they comprehensively understand all processing activities across the organization and are kept up at night worrying about potential risks flying under the radar.

What can we, as privacy professionals do differently? We need to optimize resources by automating certain tasks to mature privacy governance processes, optimizing privacy professionals' time and enabling them to focus on strategy, risk management, and operational efficiency for the privacy program.

Setting a New Standard for Privacy Management

In an ideal world, privacy teams wouldn’t have to spend their days chasing stakeholders for updates or worrying about gaps in compliance. Instead, they could confidently rely on trusted tools that keep pace with their organizations’ innovative practices. 

Reflect on your privacy operations: Are you relying on outdated methods to manage increasingly complex privacy requirements and business practices? If so, it’s time to embrace smarter solutions. Modern technology can help transform your privacy program from reactive compliance to proactive governance.

This is where Cyera can help. Cyera’s platform is designed to empower privacy professionals with:

• Continuous Data Discovery: Cyera can integrate and continuously scan your datastores to identify personal information (structured and unstructured) in both cloud and on-premise environments using AI-powered data classifications, ensuring your data inventory stays up to date and contains the necessary context about the data to empower your decision-making.
  
  
• Automated Technical Controls: Cyera can establish customized and contextual policies that align with your processing activities, proactively monitoring and flagging deviations for your review and suggesting remediation.
  
  
• Scalable and Reliable Solutions: Cyera can automate repetitive tasks, allowing privacy teams to optimize their limited headcount’s time, improve their productivity and effectiveness, and focus on strategic initiatives and operational improvements.
  
  

The question isn’t whether innovation can improve privacy operations—it’s whether you’re ready to take the leap. By adopting Cyera’s scalable, automated solutions, privacy professionals can finally set a new standard for privacy management—one that’s adaptive, efficient, and future-proof. Let’s make it happen.

Learn more about Cyera’s data privacy capabilities.