The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Sarbanes-Oxley. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Gramm-Leach-Bliley. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). These are just a few of the regulations that include stringent requirements for IT security and data protection. Covered organizations must comply with these regulations or face penalties in the event of a security breach.
Why Regulatory Compliance Needs to Be a Continuous Process
Why Regulatory Compliance Needs to Be a Continuous Process
These regulations are complex, often with hundreds or even thousands of specific mandates. Most of these mandates call for the documentation of IT processes and practices, as well as technology controls. Organizations must demonstrate compliance by producing this documentation, preserving records, and certifying the accuracy of the information.
Despite the effort involved, many organizations continue to be highly dependent on manual compliance processes involving email reminders, spreadsheets, and three-ring binders full of documentation. These outdated techniques take time and increase the risk of data entry errors and misreporting.
What’s more, organizations typically treat regulatory compliance as an annual process. They check all the boxes, turn in the report, and forget about compliance requirements until another report is due next year.
That’s where DeSeMa aims to help. For over a decade, we’ve offered expert IT risk management services to companies throughout the United States. With help from our team, we can alleviate the fears of regulatory compliance and help your company develop protocols that make it a continuous process. Continue reading below to learn more, and give us a call to get started!
The Risks of Annual Compliance
It’s easy to understand why regulatory compliance has become more of an annual task, as opposed to a continuous process. Assembling and verifying the report is a time-consuming, labor-intensive process that distracts IT teams from other tasks. Often, organizations must comply with multiple regulations. For example, a healthcare facility might be covered by HIPAA, PCI DSS, and state privacy laws, among many others. In cases such as this, there simply aren’t enough resources to give compliance the attention it deserves.
However, the IT environment is always changing, and new threats are constantly emerging. An organization might be compliant the day the report is submitted, but by the next day, it is not. If there’s a security breach, it turns into a double hit. The organization not only suffers downtime and data loss, but may also face fines and other penalties because it wasn’t in compliance with the applicable regulation.
For example, HIPAA penalties can reach as much as $1.5 million. Noncompliance with the PCI DSS could result in $5,000 to $500,000 in fines. If penalties and settlements are made public, it can damage a business’s reputation, as well as customer and business partner relationships.
A better strategy is to implement a continual compliance review. Like maintaining inventory, there should be an ongoing process of keeping compliance documentation up to date.
The Continuous Compliance Approach
DeSeMa offers a continuous compliance service as an extension of our asset management offerings. In a previous post, we discussed the critical importance of asset management in IT security and why data should be included in asset tracking. DeSeMa utilizes an advanced toolset to track not only hardware and software, but also data storage locations. This process is done continually so that IT asset inventories are always current.
As an extension of that monitoring service, we can also provide ongoing compliance audits. Because there’s always an up-to-date “single source of truth,” we can assemble reports and attestations on the fly. An auditor could show up and say, “I want a report in an hour,” and you will be able to provide it.
Your organization is never noncompliant. If you suffer a data breach, it puts you in a much better bargaining position with the regulatory agency. You can prove that you were and are compliant and avoid having to pay any fines.
Regulatory compliance is a complex, time-consuming headache, and yearly manual processes never really achieve their objectives. Let DeSeMa automate and manage this process of regulatory compliance so that you are continually compliant and able to prove it. Give us a call to get started with the process today!