The public announcements of discovered breaches within organizations have become more prevalent each year. With it, the cost of remediation due to exposure has also increased. Regulators have countered by imposing even more stringent frameworks on organizations.
Compliance frameworks, in turn, can become a maze filled with potential obstacles, dead ends, and hurdles to overcome. Depending on the organization’s vertical, that maze can take the form of frameworks such as HIPAA, Hi-Trust for healthcare, PCI, SOC2 for the financial sector, or geographical regulations such as GDPR and FedRAMP.
Organizations are quickly expanding into a full or hybrid workforce and utilizing PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) providers such as AWS and Azure, or SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) applications like O365 and Salesforce. On-Prem, Cloud, and Hybrid environments call for additional reworking of compliance frameworks. As frameworks are rewritten to fit the needs of the current landscape, the need for a cybersecurity partner becomes an absolute necessity.
The top three factors cited as obstacles to a team’s confidence in their ability to address compliance risks were a lack of knowledgeable personnel, inadequate resources, and poor company culture.
of risk executives said compliance and regulatory risk presents the greatest threat to their company's ability to drive growth. Another 35% credited it to cyber or information risk.
Organizations with a high level of noncompliance with regulations showed an average cost of $5.05 million. This is a 12.6% increase compared to the average cost of a data breach, or $560,000.
Breaches cost almost $220,000 more on average when noncompliance with regulations was indicated as a factor in the event.
In 2023, 58% of security and IT professionals said they need larger compliance budgets.
If you’ve ever done your taxes you’ll know that the tax code is only increasingly becoming more complex, much like compliance frameworks. However, there are commonalities across all frameworks that can be addressed. These commonalities are great initial starting points to address your compliance requirements.
Assessing risks in compliance deals with analyzing and prioritizing potential exposure points across your organization. Both internal and external risks require consideration and strategies to manage. Frequently factors such as decentralized logs, data handling practices, lack of employee digital awareness, and emerging threats are high-risk areas.
Establishing organizational guidelines and policies before, during, and after a potential breach creates a chain of custody delineating responsibilities across all departments in an organization. Further policies outlining organizational commitments to compliance, risk management, and ethics help further define and demonstrate an audit trail of compliance observance.
When monitoring and auditing it’s critical to understand the areas that require strict attention to detail. External auditors will take measure of whether logs have been centralized such as in a SIEM. SOC support can demonstrate diligence in monitoring through threat hunting, log pattern recognition, and behavioral analytics.
This is one of the most common questions, especially for organizations new to compliance frameworks. Commonly, researching government and industry websites is a good starting point. Legal experts can also provide insight into current or upcoming regulations that could impact the organization. Lastly, establishing a solid cybersecurity partner can prepare you to meet requirements and stay in the know.
Breaches found to be caused by non-compliance typically suffer the following consequences:
As more organizations expand their digital footprint into the cloud and add remote workers, the potential for exposure increases. Threat actors have moved to targets of opportunity with exposed vulnerabilities in applications, misconfigurations, and operating systems. Cloud migrations expose organizations to the shared responsibility model, which requires end users to secure and protect servers, cloud storage such as S3 and Blob, and code developed in the cloud.
Cyber insurance typically will not cover breaches found out of compliance. While insurance is designed to provide coverage for forensic investigations, legal fees, and notifications, none of these are protected without proper compliance adherence. Further, insurance companies will mandate that an organization maintain compliance across all the framework’s regulations as a condition for coverage.
Compliance doesn’t have to keep you up at night. While regulations will continue to evolve, establishing a solid cybersecurity partnership can help you sleep better. Finding the right tools and services that meet your compliance needs is more important than ever.
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