POPICheck is a cloud based, rapid assessment tool that helps organisations gauge their readiness for compliance with the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), South Africa's data protection law.

To ensure POPIA compliance that is legally aligned with the official regulations, it is vital to follow a structured engagement based on POPICheck’s industry-standard questions. This input makes it possible to measure an organization’s current compliance status quickly and accurately, and then prescribe the appropriate remediation required to achieve full compliance. Businesses are then able to plan effectively and realistically, as well as manage capacity and resources, with a view to achieving full legal compliance as quickly as possible.

POPICheck covers assessments over several critical areas, namely: Policy and Strategy, Lifecycle and Process, Security, and People.

Each section encompasses specific questions, each with five predefined answers. Answers are weighted and produce an overall POPIA-readiness score per area. They are then combined to produce an overall Organizational Readiness score for the active assessment. Based on the answers provided, the tool proposes a series of corrective actions for each area, and an overall recommendation for the steps and remediations required for the organization to achieve compliance. This guide is also available in report format at any point during the assessment.

Stakeholders are able to track their POPIA-compliance progress by updating answers as items are resolved. This will, in turn, dynamically update the overall scoring, allowing the project or change manager to gauge progress across the entire company, as well as at a more granular regional, subsidiary and departmental level.

As a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tool, POPICheck does not require upfront infrastructure or skills investments, is fast and easy-to-use, and was developed in conjunction with a reputed legal company.

First Digital offers a variation of POPICheck, called ReadinessPoint, which ships with other pre-built assessment modules such as: COVID-19 Workplace Readiness; Cloud Readiness; SharePoint On Premise to Cloud Migration Readiness; O365; Biztalk and Integration Readiness. ReadinessPoint also features a Module Creator Wizard, allowing users to create their own custom assessment modules within the tool quickly and easily.