eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Law firms aren’t particularly known for developing software. They’re much more apt to be protecting—or prosecuting—software developers in intellectual property litigation than writing code and testing applications.
That’s where the celebrated Silicon Valley firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati has taken a different path. With dependable data privacy protection becoming an international and stateside problem, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based firm decided to take matters into its own chamber of innovation and come up with a software application that is designed to fit what many companies are looking for—and will soon be looking for—in the future.
SixFifty Privacy, a new enterprise app designed and built by SixFifty, Wilson Sonsini’s spinoff software development firm, is a first-of-its kind collaboration between some of the world’s brightest minds in privacy and proven compliance automation technologists. The SixFifty debut May 22 comes a mere seven months ahead of the launch of California’s consumer data privacy regulation, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) of 2018.
California the First State to Regulate
California is the first state in the U.S. to enact its own regulation similar to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which took effect May 25 of last year. The law literally transforms the way commerce is managed around the globe. Companies now have to be much more transparent about where data actually lives, how data is accessed and protected, and, when data is breached, how they plan to remedy those breaches.
Compliance for GDPR has been estimated to cost businesses more than $7.8 billion to comply.
CCPA is expected to impact more than 500,000 U.S. businesses starting Jan. 1, 2020. Other states, including Washington, Oregon and Maine, also have privacy regulations set to go into effect sometime in 2020.
“The idea behind SixFifty is to make the assets of Wilson Sonsini more accessible to the market,” Kimball Parker, President of SixFifty, told eWEEK. “Right now, every company would like to use Wilson Sonsini, because they’re one of the best law firms in the world. But not every company can afford them. And Wilson Sonsini can’t scale to accommodate every company in the United States. So that why we’ve built this app.”
It’s All About Automating Processes
SixFifty Privacy is all about automating processes to comply directly with the new state regulation. To help companies comply before Jan. 1, SixFifty Privacy automated the four key obligations of the CCPA, including: 1) collecting, managing and fulfilling consumer requests within 45 days; 2) mapping the flow of data through a business; 3) generating policies and other compliance documents; and 4) training employees who handle consumer information on the new law, all in one place.
Within 15 minutes, Parker said, SixFifty Privacy can lay the foundation for most companies to comply with the CCPA, saving them time and money and granting them peace of mind.
“We’ve automated each part of the requirements to adhere to the CCPA, and tried to make it as easy as possible for organizations to meet these obligations,” Parker said.
Each of the four modules of the app can be acquired separately or all together, as needed by the customer. The package is aimed at companies with $25 million or more in revenue, Parker said.
Pricing Information
For example, the request system starts at $5,000 per year and goes up from there, based on how many requests are received.
The training module ranges from $50 to $100 per person, and the document module starts at $7,500 (one-time price with a yearly renewal that amounts to 20 percent of that cost,) or around $2,000 per year, Parker said. Data mapping also costs a $7,500 one-time fee plus a $2,000/year cost for updating.
“On Jan. 1, hundreds of thousands of businesses will have to adjust to the new realities brought about by the CCPA, including changing their data management practices and policies or face significant consequences,” Doug Clark, managing partner of WSGR, said in a media advisory. “The CCPA is only the tip of the iceberg for regulations around consumer data privacy.”
For more information about SixFifty and to take a free assessment to see how the CCPA will impact your business, go here.