Challenges of Compliance Management: Automation to the Rescue

The challenges of compliance management are increasing, not decreasing. As data breaches hit the news regularly, you’re stuck between your customers and your Board. Both want answers, but they have different needs. Negotiating these needs while trying to keep up-to-date comes with the stress of being the one person who stands between your organization and the certain doom of a cyberattack.

This is why an automated tool is more than a nifty gadget—it’s a necessary compliance management solution. To better understand how ZenGRC can solve your eight most pressing problems, book a demo with one of our experts.

Communicating Across Areas

Siloed information presents one of the biggest challenges facing compliance managers. When departments don’t speak to one another, they duplicate each other’s work and waste resources. This is inefficient! In addition, the overlap of many compliance programs means that changes to one control may impact multiple programs.

Compliance management tools flatten this process by letting you see all of the programs affected by a control. This allows you to stay compliant without wasting time and resources to ensure that all the I’s are dotted and t’s are crossed.

Source of Truth

The old adage about too many cooks in the kitchen can apply when many employees are setting controls. When different departments are involved in the management of your security program, you may have too much information in too many different places telling too many different stories. This can lead to a lack of cohesion in your compliance program.

An automated GRC tool offers you a single location to house all your data. By doing this, you create a single source of truth that provides visibility into your landscape and leads to better audit results.

Spreadsheets

Many compliance programs start out small, so at first, spreadsheets seem like an obvious, low-cost answer. In the short term, this is true. However, unless you want your business to stagnate, you need to be agile and prepare your program to mature from the start.

While GRC tools cost money upfront, they offer sleek designs that can help you start small while preparing you to end big. For those new to creating overarching compliance programs, you need easy-to-use tools that allow you to set up a program quickly and efficiently. Instead of slogging through the process and wasting resources trying to determine the important standards, find a tool that helps you negotiate this. The right tool will allow you to grow as you need to add more compliance to your ever-evolving business.

Outdated Software

You started with a software, but maintaining it has suddenly become unwieldy. As your organization matures, the outdated software no longer provides services that match your evolving needs. These tools are nothing more than screwdrivers when what you really need is a power drill.

Finding a SaaS tool that can rapidly respond to your changing needs makes all the difference in speeding up your compliance and saving time. SaaS software constantly updates because it’s web-based. You don’t have to update your system because the platform does that for you!

Increased Liability

Thanks to Equifax, legislators are looking to increase regulatory standards for information security. The more regulations, the more work you’re going to have. Moreover, your Board of Directors will want to know how you plan to tackle these changes. Reuters notes that 60% of compliance specialists surveyed expect their personal liability to increase in 2017 and 2018.

If you’re worried that you can be held responsible for a security problem, you need a compliance management tool and reporting system that lets you see your landscape. Automation gives you visibility into your compliance program by helping you engage in gap analyses. ZenGRC offers a “Program Health” dashboard that lets you see how strong your compliance stance is for different programs. This insight gives you the ability to focus your efforts on the areas of greatest compliance risk.

New Regulations

With the GDPR rollout in 2018 and US legislators itching to incorporate fines, the information security sector is in a state of flux. New regulations force the creation of yet more compliance programs. However, everyone knows that these will draw from current standards.

Automation’s ease of control mapping will be one of the most important tools to help adapt to these new regulations. When you can see the map of your current controls and standards, you can see which of your processes already match these new requirements. Now, all you have to do is focus on the add new controls to stay up-to-date.

Know Your Value

Agent Carter from the Captain America stories famously told men who doubted her, “I know my value.” Compliance is increasingly important. As we all know, compliance is the key to protecting companies from data breaches and cyberattacks. This means that your work is an increasingly valuable asset. However, some people may not believe this.

Be your organization’s Agent Carter but use automation to show your Board metrics. Finding the right metrics means gathering data efficiently. Automation offers you one location to store and track the compliance management benefits you provide to your organization to help you continue to set benchmarks and goals.

Third-Party Risks

Whether you’re the vendor or you’re managing the vendor, business interconnectedness means that everyone’s risks align. Vendor risk is like a house of cards; if one falls, the whole structure collapses. This means that you have to prove your compliance to your customers as well as track the compliance of your vendors.

This continuous tracking means that you need one location where you can access information. Automation aggregates information in a single location so that you can answer customer questions or view vendor SOC reports at a moment’s notice.

Compliance Fatigue

You know that look. Sometimes you see it in the mirror, sometimes from employees. It’s that look of “oh dear goodness, not again.” With today’s rapid business pace and an increased workload, responding to and making numerous compliance requests is leading to that look.

Automation helps you get your rest and keep fatigue at bay. Being able to schedule tasks and monitor their completion takes you out of the loop. You don’t need to nag people, and they won’t feel overwhelmed by your requests. Moreover, with ZenGRC’s gamification model, your employees feel a sense of success and reward upon task completion.

You don’t need to face the challenges of compliance management alone. With ZenGRC you’ve got experts to help and a tool that can streamline your process. Book a demo today to see how you can ease your burden with automation.