“The act of complying with a directive,” or “the state of meeting regulations or norms,” is how compliance is defined.

It’s defined in the corporate sector as the process of ensuring that your company and its personnel obey all applicable laws, rules, standards, and ethical practices.

Internal policies and processes, as well as federal and state legislation, are all covered under corporate compliance.

Compliance enforcement aids in the prevention and detection of rule infractions, protecting your firm from penalties and lawsuits.

Why do you need compliance?

The purpose is to protect your business. It’s as simple as that. But the return on investment could be significant, helping you avoid waste, fraud, abuse, discrimination, and other practices that disrupt operations and put your company at risk.

Your corporate compliance program needs to be integrated with all compliance efforts enterprise-wide, from the management of external regulations and internal policies to comprehensive employee training.

By making sure all departments and staff are working together to maintain standards, you can mitigate the risk of major failures and violations.

Compliance checklist

There are certain checklist for assessing company compliance processes, which includes the following questions:

1. How have senior leaders supported or discouraged the type of wrongdoing in question through their words and actions?
2. What specific steps have they made to show that they are leading the company’s compliance and remediation efforts?
3. How does the organisation keep track of its senior executives’ actions?

An effective program improves communication between leadership and staff. It should include a process for creating, updating, distributing, and tracking compliance policies.

After all, employees can’t be held responsible for rules and regulations they don’t know exist.

Creating a company culture that emphasises integrity and ethical behaviour is what compliance is all about. This begins at the very top. Your leaders must first obey the guidelines in order for the programme to succeed.

They should promote ethical behaviour and discuss the necessity of compliance publicly. Employee input should be encouraged by company executives, who should emphasise that exposing illegal or unethical activity will not result in retaliation.

Employees that do not follow compliance policies and standards are ineffective. After you’ve established your corporate compliance program’s policies and procedures, you’ll need to make sure that everyone on your team is aware of them. Ensure that all compliance rules and procedures are read and signed by corporate officers, workers, and third-party vendors.

Laws, rules, business policies, and forbidden behaviour should be taught to all workers and relevant vendors. You may wish to conduct training geared to individual personnel in high-risk areas, depending on the size of your firm.

Some of the compliance is

1.  ISO 27000

The International Organisation for Standardisation created the

ISO 27000Series. It’s a versatile information security framework that can be used by businesses of different shapes and sizes.

ISO 27001 and ISO 27002 are the two main standards that define the requirements and methods for establishing an information security management system (ISMS). Having an ISMS in place is a crucial audit and compliance task.

ISO 27000 outlines ISMS programme requirements and includes an overview and vocabulary. The code of practice for developing ISMS controls is defined by ISO 27002.

2. NIST SP 800-53

NIST SP 800-53 is a standard developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

NIST maintains a large collection of IT standards, many of which are related to information security. The NIST SP 800 Series, first published in 1990, covers practically every area of information security, with a growing emphasis on cloud security.

The information security baseline for US federal entities is NIST SP 800-53, which is also extensively used in the commercial sector. The creation of information security frameworks, such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, has been aided by SP 800-53.

3. GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)

GDPR is a set of security rules that must be implemented by global businesses in order to preserve the security and privacy of EU citizens’ personal data.

Controls for prohibiting illegal access to stored data, as well as access control methods such as least privilege, role-based access, and multifactor authentication, are all required by GDPR.

Some best practices for  compliance

Create a cybersecurity compliance strategy

Compliance isn’t something that happens by itself; the best approach to be compliant is to devise a strategy that brings your IT, security, and compliance teams together. Your stakeholders, a list of standards you’re expected to meet, and a detailed risk assessment should all be included in your plan.

Ensure that your teams are communicating with one another

Because your employees are often compartmentalised, ensuring cybersecurity compliance can be difficult. When it comes to data breaches, IT or your security staff is on the front lines.

The same can be said for your compliance team, which may be familiar with the rules but not with the technology. Make sure they’re communicating with one another so they can keep your company up to date.

Use smart and automatic tools:

As your company grows, it can be difficult to maintain track of your infrastructure manually, which might jeopardise your capacity to stay compliant. You can make company operations more efficient and uniform by automating procedures.

Patch and update on a regular basis:

A patching schedule is essential; thieves are aware of when updates are published and anticipate companies delaying or failing to patch on time. Patching your systems keeps them up to date and improves security, performance, and compliance.

How StrongBox IT can help you to get aligned with the compliances?

The security testing exercises performed by StrongBox IT helps you adhere to major clauses across all regulating compliances and general information security processes.

With experience across standard reporting formats for regulated compliances, our test reports become good enough evidence to support your commitment to Information Security.