Learn how to mitigate compliance issues before they materialize
It’s easy to lose sight of compliance requirements, especially for startups and small businesses that are busy building a new cloud-based application. But while you’re trying to beat the competition to market, keeping a close eye on compliance risks can prevent a lot of financial pain down the road. Figuring out how to manage compliance risk early on also helps you launch the best solution possible and actually speeds up time to market when your product is not held up in lengthy security reviews. But first, you’re going to need the right tools for the job.
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How to Manage Compliance Risk: 3 Tools
Compliance Risk Management Framework
Compliance Risk Assessment Templates
Compliance Risk Management System
Can Compliance Be Never at Risk?
What Is Compliance Risk
In development, compliance risk is defined as anything that presents a threat to your product’s compliance with required standards, such as SOC 2, PCI-DSS, or HIPAA. That includes weak or ineffective security protocols, but can also extend to non-existent or unclear compliance policies and procedures.
Managing compliance risks is an important component of your overall compliance strategy. Identifying, isolating, and resolving a security threat can prevent a future cyberattack, protecting valuable data from falling into the wrong hands. Robust compliance management tactics also act as a shield against the tide of financial woes that usually accompany a breach and the subsequent reputational damage your brand can suffer.
Some security standards, including HIPAA, GDPR, and CCPA are legally required, which means non-compliance can saddle you with hefty fines. Even for non-legally required compliance standards, like SOC 2, losing compliance can result in erosion of trust. In other words, figuring out how to manage compliance risk is much easier and less expensive than dealing with the consequences of non-compliance.
How to Manage Compliance Risk: 3 Tools
Even if your company doesn’t have a large compliance department, there are a number of tools and strategies you can use to develop a compliance risk management process.
Compliance Risk Management Framework
Also called a risk assessment framework, a compliance risk management framework is a document that lays out the agreed-upon governance and structure your company follows to manage risks. Many organizations use the COSO EMR framework or the ISO 31000 framework as the foundation for their own framework, then add processes that make sense for their teams. A typical compliance risk management framework includes these components: risk identification; risk measurement and assessment; risk mitigation; risk reporting and monitoring; and risk governance (who is responsible for what aspect of risk mitigation). Ideally, each component should have a detailed set of procedures for specifically how you carry out the actions in each section, plus any automation or other tools that can be used as an aid.
Creating this framework helps DevOps teams manage risk because it leaves no ambiguity about who is responsible for what and how the processes should be followed. That being said, these types of documents are most useful if you create them before running a gap analysis or doing any other in-depth risk assessment. Even better, creating a compliance risk management framework before you begin building your product gives you the most insurance against missing a piece of the compliance puzzle.
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Compliance Risk Assessment Templates
Compliance risk assessment templates are pre-built documents that you should be able to customize and complete in order to accurately assess your organization’s compliance risks. A completed risk assessment summarizes your company’s risk profile, identifies gaps and needed improvements, suggests remediations, and indicates the next set of steps to take as well as the overall direction of your compliance program.
If you’re using a compliance management system (more on those in a bit), it should come with a set of risk assessment templates, which you can customize and draw from over and over again as you continue to add features to your product. Once complete, risk assessments are usually included in reports to present an overall compliance risk picture to upper management. They are incredibly useful for identifying gaps and weaknesses in your regulatory compliance matrix and should include a section for any remediation actions planned or already taken.
Compliance Risk Management System
A solution that helps you track and manage compliance, a compliance risk management system (CRMS) is a necessity for all DevOps teams, but especially those working with limited time and resources. Modern compliance risk management systems, such as DuploCloud, Hyperproof, and AuditBoard, use automated compliance and risk management workflows. These solutions will also help you schedule out recurring compliance tasks, generate documentation for audits and otherwise act as an infinitely useful companion to your compliance efforts.
Another important feature of a good CRMS is integration with popular DevOps tools like Jira, as well as any project management systems you use. Being able to work across different platforms makes compliance tasks more visible to your team and ensures that security features are not relegated to the bottom of to-do lists.
Though each of these three tools provides compliance risk mitigation, they work best when combined. A compliance risk management framework gives you a map of your processes, risk assessment templates give you insights into your up-to-date risks, and a CRMS ties it all together by tracking your efforts.
Can Compliance Be Never at Risk?
If you’re using an automated continuous compliance platform, the question becomes less “How to manage compliance risk?” and more “How do I empower my team to create a compliance worklfow that makes sense for us?” For example, DuploCloud offers out-of-the-box compliance and security that ensures adherence to 90% of the controls you set, which leaves your team with time and space to figure out how they want to augment security features, instead of re-creating standard protocols. If you want to learn more about DuploCloud, reach out to schedule a demo.
