Every business resides within an industry, and every industry has certain regulations businesses must adhere to. However, compliance isn’t just something you do once and forget about. If you want to avoid regulatory violations, then it’s necessary to maintain compliance. This is the goal of continuous compliance.
What Is Continuous Compliance?
Continuous compliance is a proactive, ongoing approach to maintaining the requirements set by frameworks and regulations. Essentially, this involves constant monitoring of your company’s security posture. Through continuous compliance, you can ensure you’re always meeting regulatory requirements and following best practices.
At the end of the day, following regulations isn’t something you do just to pass an audit. Your business should be actively working to make compliance part of your daily operations. But why is following regulatory standards so important for businesses?
Why Continuous Compliance Is Important
Even when your organization meets compliance requirements, it likely won’t stay that way forever. Your industry’s requirements usually change in order to keep up with rapidly evolving cyberthreats. So while you may pass an audit today, that may not be the case next time. But continuous compliance monitoring isn’t all about passing tests. There are also advantages.
The benefits include:
Real-Time Compliance
Through the help of continuous compliance, you can identify your organization’s shortcomings in real-time. This creates an opportunity for you to be proactive and address issues before they have an affect on your infrastructure. Real-time compliance can definitely come in handy in situations where you have to pass an assessment on short notice or if you’re facing an attack on a newly identified vulnerability.
Streamlines the Auditing Process
Staying constantly vigilant of the status of your business reduces the amount of stress and effort that goes into preparing for a compliance assessment. Since you’ve been staying on top of your industry’s regulatory requirements, you’re always ready to pass a test.
Better Security
Cybersecurity regulations are created for the purpose of making sure your business meets the minimum requirements to defend against cyberthreats. You can make your network more secure by working to achieve these standards and building on them. This ensures you don’t face the risks of cyberattacks, such as -insert statistic here.
Improved Reputation
Your customers and partners want to work with a company they can trust with their information. If you follow industry cybersecurity regulations, it shows you take cybersecurity seriously. This can enhance your reputation and make your business more desirable to work with.
How Can You Achieve Continuous Compliance?
If you want to achieve continuous compliance, then you have two options: do it yourself or work with a managed security services provider (MSSP). An MSSP, like RCS Secure, has the expertise, continuous compliance tools, and automated compliance testing solutions to make staying up to date with industry regulations easy. As a result, most businesses choose to partner with an MSSP.
The process of achieving continuous compliance follows a few steps which include:
Identifying Your Compliance Requirements
Just as every industry is unique, so too are the cyberthreats they face. This demands for different approaches to required cybersecurity measures. For example, the healthcare industry has the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the financial industry has the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA).
In some cases, you may find that you have to comply with more than one type of regulation. So the first step to continuous compliance is understanding what compliance requirements you have to meet.
Identifying Critical Assets
What are the parts of your business you can’t do without? These are your critical assets. Identifying these allows you to determine how to best protect them.
Identifying Security Gaps
Do you know if your IT has any vulnerabilities? If there are gaps in your security, they could end up being found and exploited by hackers. You need to perform a vulnerability audit to find out if your network has any security gaps. If the test finds any, you can quickly go in and start applying fixes.
Enabling Insights
In addition to closing security gaps, you should also be gathering insights on your infrastructure. These insights can give you the information you need to make improvements.
Maintaining Documents
It’s one thing to achieve continuous compliance, it’s another to prove it. You can prove that you’re following best practices through proper compliance documentation. This includes audits, reviews, questionnaires, and more.
Let RCS Secure Help You Achieve Continuous Compliance
RCS Secure is an industry leader in cybersecurity solutions. If you would like to learn more about continuous compliance, compliance automation, or how we can help you on your compliance journey, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.
