Sunday, January 2, 2011

IT Compliance Best Practices for a Progressive Future


Compliance can be an overwhelming task with ever-growing demands for adherence to various industry regulations such as HIPAA Compliance, GLBA Compliance, SOX Compliance and many more. However, it is possible to achieve complete compliance and security by encouraging the members of organizations to follow a streamlined path towards effective management of IT resources and efficient operations.

Hence the need is to enforce a strategy that will help accomplish compliance requirements and yield positive results. And the basic aim of such a strategy is to inculcate business best practices, including the following:

Comprehending & Evaluating Compliance Performance: Enforcement of compliance policies should be undertaken with the explicit approval of  the management and the technical teams. The technical team has to ensure that the system and network devices are configured with standards approved by the management team, in a manner that does not hinder compliance.

Implementation of Risk Assessment Measures: An intrusion prevention system proficient in risk assessment provides solutions against anticipated threats. The employees of an organization need to realize that merely understanding the worth of compliance will not serve the purpose. They need to be aware of the present compliance status and the areas that lack compliance, so that standard risk assessment procedures can be implemented. Risk assessment would involve the following:
·         Formulate a plan to optimize available resources
·         Collect all relevant data have for further analysis
·         Review all business processes involving the process owners
·         Test and analyze Technical and technology solutions involving the technology owners
·         Document analytical findings and risk levels, and report the remediation measures and improvisation techniques

Enforcing Appropriate Policies: While ensuring IT Compliance with existing regulations, organizations should also ensure that the security infrastructure is capable of identifying risks and compliance gaps, and reporting the status. A centralized management process can help in this regard, and the controls used should provide both preventive and detective solutions.

Tracking, Enforcing & Reporting: It is very important to ensure that compliance practices are working properly and in the event of non-compliance, matters are dealt with promptly and effectively. Internal audits can be very helpful in tracking and reporting the compliance status.

Organizations are completely secure and compliant only when all governance, risk and compliance issues are addressed effectively. The key is a competent compliance management software solution with automated and integrated processes, which has the capability to perform all the above-mentioned functions efficiently.

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