Addressing Multiple IT Compliance Regulations

GLBA, SOX, HIPPA, and COBiT, ISO, FISMA, PCI-DSS and many more legal standards govern organizations today. Now more than ever, organizations whether small, mid-sized or large are struggling to comply with multiple regulations. And the complexities involved in complying with these standards can be quite overwhelming. Establishing, maintaining, and managing compliance with all these regulations is not only expensive but also time-consuming. 

While some organizations have effectively achieved compliance with these multiple regulations, most others are unsuccessful because they approach compliance initiatives as one-off projects. They deploy controls separately for each regulation, making the process more complicated and expensive. While such fragmented governance is not effective in dealing with growing compliance demands, it also poses serious threats to the security framework of an organization. Here are the shortcomings of using disparate systems for multiple regulations:

·         Inability to align multiple single point solutions

·      Increased cost of deployment and training resulting from the adoption of multiple systems

·    Diversion of key resources and cost into deployment and training for implementing and managing these multiple systems

·         Lack of a centralized management capability resulting in lack of visibility into overall compliance status

It is therefore critical for organizations to consider a centralized system coupled with an efficient IT compliance framework. Such a system should effectively integrate risk management capabilities and control objectives for multiple regulations. Moreover, the controls and processes established using such a framework should allow multiple parties to adopt a common monitoring, assessment and reporting method which can help in standardizing results.

The key is to adopt a cloud-based, automated, and integrated compliance management solution, which enables centralized control and offers a consolidated view across the organization, thereby reducing complexities, and saving time and cost. With ready-to-use compliance frameworks and advanced context-based interface engines, such a security solution can drastically simplify the compliance process.

These solutions have built-in support for all compliance regulations and are scalable to new regulations. This eliminates the need for multiple security systems and redundant processes. And since these solutions are automated, there is no manual intervention, due to which there is no possibility of errors in the system. 

In addition to this, these solutions also holistically cover all aspects of threat management- internal or external, accidental or deliberate, intentional or unintentional through an effective and well-evolved IT governance and risk mitigation system. Hence they offer the framework to ensure overall security and compliance.

Compliance is an on-going process. And with cybercrime reaching epidemic levels, the number of regulations is only bound to grow. Managing an ever-increasing number of regulations requires automated processes to continuously monitor and report compliance status in the organization.  It is therefore essential to adopt an integrated solution that simplifies compliance management by addressing all regulatory requirements, and allows organizations to focus on their core business objectives.