A Practical Guide to Data Protection Compliance in Egypt and the Region

You cannot protect what you cannot locate. A data inventory should record, for every system, what personal data it holds, why, who can read it, where it is stored geographically, how long it is kept and what happens at the end of that period.

In most organisations this exercise finds the same surprises: exports sitting in shared drives, production copies in test environments, and analytics tools receiving more fields than anyone intended.

Most frameworks converge on the same technical core, so implement it once and map it to each standard afterwards.

Access, correction, erasure and objection requests arrive with legal deadlines. If fulfilling one requires an engineer to write a query by hand, the process will miss those deadlines under load. Build the lookup and deletion paths as tooling and log every request and its outcome.

Notification clocks start when you become aware of an incident, not when you finish investigating. That means the decision path — who declares a breach, who drafts the notification, who signs it — must be agreed in advance and tested in a tabletop exercise at least annually.

For the authoritative text of the Egyptian law, consult the official publication rather than summaries, including this one.