Many business leaders dismiss adhering to cyber regulations as a box-ticking nuisance that doesn’t truly help with a company’s security posture, but new data suggests otherwise.
Do you have enough oversight of your company’s use of AI to qualify for ISO 42001? Does your team run internal assessments often enough for SOC 2’s standards? If so, does that actually make a breach less likely?
Compliance with regulatory frameworks that govern cybersecurity and data privacy issues is often seen as a headache for organisations, dismissed as an exercise in bureaucratic formalities. On the other hand, working towards securing the company’s digital assets is generally seen as crucial, valued for its contribution to organisational safety, brand trust and business continuity.
While cybersecurity teams and compliance managers have been known to bristle at one another, nowadays they’re increasingly aligned. A recent survey from PwC reported that 96% of business leaders said regulations prompted their organisation to improve its security. More than three-quarters added that those same regulations have challenged, improved, or increased their security posture.
It’s true that cyber compliance doesn’t automatically translate into an effective cyber security posture. But it’s also true that compliance gives cyber teams a structure for closing up the increasingly numerous types of gaps in security.
For organisations that had already seen the light, and for GRC execs who’ve been singing this song for years, the PwC study’s findings are hardly surprising. Whether you fall into that category or not, here are some insights into optimising your cyber compliance strategy for maximum security impact.
A risk-based approach prevents tunnel vision
Due to the sheer volume of required controls involved, compliance frameworks demand that you take a risk-based approach to cybersecurity. That forces a shift away from tools and networks, and towards a focus on people, policies, and threats, no matter where they arise.
When you apply risk matrix-based decision making to cybersecurity, you gain a more holistic view of security risks and avoid developing tunnel vision that can blind you to risks that arrive from unexpected directions.
Integrating compliance also helps ensure that your cybersecurity strategies are aligned with business objectives, an approach that helps reveal deeper threats that could otherwise go unnoticed. For example, fraud doesn’t always receive much attention from cybersecurity teams, but it’s a serious business risk. Compliance-based security ensures that you consider and develop tactics to mitigate fraud attempts.
Compliance keeps security up to date
Keeping up with your organisation’s sprawling attack surfaces and the latest emerging threats from new vectors is a key challenge for effective cybersecurity. Regulators are known to update their requirements accordingly, on a dynamic basis, but making sense of and implementing the latest standards can be a sisyphean endeavour.
Embracing compliance helps ensure that your cybersecurity tech and tools – such as firewalls, encryption, and intrusion detection systems – are kept aligned with the latest updates to governance policies and compliance requirements. In the most basic way, compliance enforces a schedule for audits, assessments, and vulnerability testing. Using Cypago, a cyber GRC automation platform, takes this a step further, as it allows you to build a custom system that’s automatically responsive to the latest requirements.
Cypago’s no-code workflows sync with the latest compliance framework controls to monitor your digital footprint and identify compliance gaps that could indicate security vulnerabilities. The solution mitigates many threats immediately using rule-based automation, and assigns those that can’t be automated to relevant team members, keeping you both compliant and secure.
Incorporating compliance enables improved prioritisation
Cybersecurity teams are engaged in a high-stakes version of whack-a-mole, but they can’t address every risk and threat that appears. With a compliance-infused, risk-based approach, they can identify the threats to tackle first and allocate resources effectively, so as to protect your most critical systems and sensitive data.
Compliance frameworks also organise various aspects of your cyber posture into logical buckets, such as data privacy oversight, identity and access management (IAM), encryption, and attack monitoring protocols.
Most data breaches arise from unauthorised access. Unsurprisingly, GDPR, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and SOX, among others, prioritise IAM, with specific requirements around user access, privileges, and data governance. These requirements are best managed through IAM solutions like SailPoint, which can streamline access management, access monitoring, and identity verification.
Compliance drives a shift to proactive
Compliance frameworks emphasise a proactive approach to risk management. Most regulations and frameworks incorporate requirements for continuous monitoring, regular audits, and frequent reviews.
A compliance-based approach to security pushes teams to actively anticipate risks and seek out signs of attacks on an ongoing basis. Once you incorporate compliance into your cybersecurity strategies, you’ll move your defences from purely reactive to proactive.
Instead of constantly putting out fires, you’ll be able to see them coming and plan the best ways to mitigate their effects, or prevent them from affecting you at all.
Regulations enforce incident response planning
Every cybersecurity professional knows that robust incident response is an important element in building a strong security posture. When you have a defined process for responding to data breaches or other security events, you’ll streamline reporting both externally and internally to those responsible for addressing the incident, thereby speeding up root cause investigation and mitigation efforts.
Helpfully, incident response is mandated in detail in many regulations. That means that if you comply with laws like GDPR, HIPAA, or other data privacy regulations, you’ll already have an incident response plan in place for data breaches and many other situations.
Syteca, an incident response tool, makes it easier to set up smooth incident response protocols, with features like automated user access alerts and mitigation responses.
The whole is more secure than the sum of its parts
Nowadays, cyber risks represent a significant percentage of all business risks, so there’s no way to achieve compliance without cybersecurity input. For example, NIST frameworks place cybersecurity protocols in the context of business risk; PCI-DSS requires information security; and every data privacy law includes user access review policies.
What you need is cybersecurity and compliance together. Powerful cybersecurity makes compliance more effective, and respect for compliance directs cybersecurity to be more efficient, feeding back into the broader system to strengthen the entire organisation. When security teams embrace compliance and unite in achieving it, both security and compliance are stronger.