What are some of the worries that keep compliance professionals up at night? For one, stressful stakeholder meetings and keeping abreast of the latest regulatory requirements. So is reporting bad news to the board or senior management, certainly.
Another nagging worry for many: Despite your best efforts, you may “misreport” an issue – not report it completely or accurately.
That scenario would be this: A week after you brief the board on a particular compliance infraction, new data emerges contradicting your previous conclusions. Or, perhaps worse, overlooked data is found in someone’s email box or a department’s shared drive – data you should have included in your analysis but didn’t.
The reality is that modern compliance management forces you to distill many individual details into a few meaningful conclusions for auditors, managers, board directors, and other groups. Those conclusions must be accurate, reliable, and understandable and often delivered under a deadline.
What Is Compliance Tracking and Reporting?
Compliance tracking and reporting is the practice of gathering, analyzing, and presenting information about an organization’s systems to show whether those systems comply with relevant industry standards or government regulations.
That information is driven by Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that a compliance officer uses for risk assessment and mitigation. Those KPIs should include metrics to track the number of systems accessing data and how customer data is collected, stored, transmitted, and deleted. In addition, the report about those KPIs should include details about the data protection controls in place and any remediation steps taken after previous compliance audits.
How Does Compliance Automation Work?
Automated compliance tools identify and protect specified types of data and systems. The appropriate rule determines the classification.
Specific patient data, for example, must be secured in accordance with HIPAA security standards.
Compliance automation also includes gathering, managing, and analyzing data at various stages during its lifespan, as well as issuing any appropriate warnings when the analysis shows a potential compliance breach.
For example, data stored in a spreadsheet may be compared to historical averages. When the automated program detects a relative increase or decrease in the numbers, a report may be prepared and distributed to the relevant stakeholders.
What are the Benefits of Compliance Automation?
Automated compliance is especially advantageous for firms that deal with sensitive data, since it provides a number of advantages in terms of security, cost savings, and reporting.
Reduced Compliance Risks
A compliance automation platform decreases the likelihood of a business being fined for falling out of compliance. Human mistakes and additional time are removed since reactions to possible issues are automated.
Automation of compliance allows continuous monitoring of your systems for vulnerabilities, allowing you to detect considerably more issues than if you did it manually, reducing risk. This has the potential to save a corporation a lot of money. For example, if a company fails to comply with HIPAA, the penalties can be as much as $50,000.
More Efficient Than Manual Processes
Human error is common in business operations, costing hours or days of wasted time and thousands of dollars in fines. Even talented, experienced staff with the best intentions might overlook a spreadsheet item, a line of code, or a compliance procedure or policy detail.
When compliance processes are automated, the only function that humans may have is to respond to correct notifications and to update the system when requirements change.
Real-time Data In One Dashboard
Compliance automation software compiles all compliance data into a single dashboard. Instead of tracking different programs or spreadsheets, you can get a general picture of how your company complies. You gain from better risk management since data is displayed in real-time.
If you begin to fall out of compliance in one or more areas, real-time notifications allow you to rectify the issue immediately rather than waiting days, weeks, or months—or until you are caught off guard during auditing.
What Are Compliance Tracking and Automating Tools?
Automated compliance tools help compliance programs by replacing manual spreadsheets and processes with a single source of truth – a system of record – for your compliance group and your organization. These systems consolidate all your compliance activity in one place. Policies, audit findings, testing results, control documentation, and other evidence that might be scattered across your enterprise in various databases would now all reside in one location.
Streamlining regulatory compliance with the automation of workflows is essential to tie together all the loose ends and report on your results with confidence. A person can only manage so many details with desktop software tools. There will come a time when you must grow into a solution designed to support compliance and all its intricacies.
Keys to Effective Compliance Management
First and foremost, there is no one-size-fits-all method for developing and implementing a company compliance plan. The efficacy of the strategy varies depending on the industry in which your company operates, the products and/or services it offers, and so on. However, there are a few basic aspects from which any firm may gain.
Follow Industry Standards
Comparing procedures and policies to industry standards is an excellent approach to confirm For example, performing market benchmarking research to compare the organization’s present benefits provision to the external market assists the organization in determining if its current benefits policies are in accordance with statutory restrictions.
Understanding what other organizations are doing in terms of process and system implementation, on the other hand, assists organizations in verifying that they comply with industry norms.
Harness Regulatory Technology
It is preferable to have a central platform that integrates all HR platforms and procedures rather than a patchwork of numerous systems to handle compliance. This not only simplifies operations and removes redundancy but also provides consistency in managing internal HR processes and streamline compliance management.
Monitor and Review Regularly
As organizations grow and develop, gaps and new risks may emerge. Regular monitoring and assessment ensure that organizations can uncover flaws quickly and take urgent action to decrease the risk of non-compliance.
Conduct Regular Training
While organizations may have solid systems and processes in place to manage compliance risk, it is all for naught if staff are ill-equipped to handle non-compliance situations or are uninformed of current regulatory changes.
Conduct frequent training or send out communication emails to keep staff informed of changes in HR or employment rules and policies.
Document Non-Compliance
In the unusual noncompliance instance, ensure the problem and corrective measures are thoroughly documented. Take note of a summary of the important results, likely fundamental causes, and future steps. This aids in tracking and ensuring that a similar incidence does not occur again.
What are the Best Practices for Implementing Automated Compliance Systems?
Compliance automation combines all of your compliance operations into a single, user-friendly dashboard. This gives the SOC team real-time data visibility, allowing them to track their compliance status in real-time.
Here is a brief rundown of the best practices for establishing compliance automation:
Consider the Use Case First
The first step in automating your compliance monitoring is to evaluate the unique use cases that are important to your company. This will give you an excellent starting point for knowing what you will need to create your strategy, select the finest and most appropriate compliance monitoring system, and integrate it into your business.
Shortlist Compliance Monitoring Tools on the Market
Automation of compliance monitoring entails replacing traditional compliance management tools, such as spreadsheets, email exchanges, file storage systems, and so on, with robust, all-encompassing automated technologies.
Many compliance management software solutions gather all necessary information from across your systems automatically and constantly, evaluate it, and show it consolidated. This enables you to conduct efficient compliance monitoring quickly and continuously.
Communicate with Staff
Introducing and adopting new processes, tools, and procedures always presents a number of obstacles, particularly when it comes to their implementation by your staff. The work required to study and train to implement new knowledge might be overwhelming.
Compliance monitoring is no exception, and it presents its own set of issues, particularly because many employees perceive it as an impediment to completing their responsibilities swiftly and effectively.
As a result, effective communication is critical. Concentrate on how to convey the transfer as efficiently as possible. Remind workers of the numerous advantages of automated compliance monitoring and how it may really relieve them of onerous manual duties, making their work much more manageable.
Integrate the Compliance Monitoring Tool with Other Systems
Integration of the compliance monitoring tool with all your other systems is crucial both from the compliance aspect and the organization’s workflow point of view – Properly gathering all relevant data is crucial for compliance management and monitoring.
You can’t achieve this if your compliance monitoring tool isn’t completely integrated with your other tools and systems. Furthermore, good integration ensures that any modifications resulting in non-compliance are flagged immediately.
Good integration with day-to-day working tools, such as Jira, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, makes compliance monitoring more effective and makes implementation and adoption much faster and smoother. Such integration means compliance teams can manage tasks more efficiently while all others can continue using the same tools they’re accustomed to.
How Compliance Automation Helps with Reporting
Your specific compliance tracking and reporting requirements will depend on your organization’s compliance frameworks. For example, if you follow the PCI DSS framework to protect credit card data, you’ll collect (and report on) one set of information. If you follow the HIPAA framework to protect personal health data, you’ll collect and report on another. Most companies will follow numerous frameworks to meet multiple regulatory compliance obligations.
Those frameworks will specify the sorts of evidence your compliance program should collect to demonstrate compliance. Some of that evidence collection might be done automatically; other times, the compliance officer might need to confer with the CISO or IT security department to gather it.
Once sufficient evidence and documentation are collected, and any necessary action to implement controls or remediate issues has been completed, typically the next step is for the company to submit to an independent audit. HIPAA, PCI DSS, and many other laws and regulations routinely require compliance audits.
Smaller organizations might be able to manage this process manually, but as the business grows, that approach will quickly unravel. With compliance automation systems, you can automate tracking of projects and results, giving you the peace of mind that comes with the proper organization of compliance requirements.
Simplify Compliance Automation with ZenGRC
Not only does an automated compliance solution such as the ZenGRC generate data more quickly; it produces more meaningful and insightful key performance indicators. ZenGRC provides information when, where, and how you want it. So when the CFO calls you with a question that’s just been raised in a meeting, you’ll have a single source of truth that can quickly provide the answers instead of rifling through your inbox, spreadsheets, or a file folder full of reports.
For example, when fielding questions as you wrap up your PCI compliance reporting, you can use ZenGRC to view the latest testing and reporting around firewall configurations, cardholder data storage security, and physical access data controls. You will also be able to access related internal audit findings.
You can focus on that deep understanding of the data needed to compose your questionnaires and attestations. That is a far better use of your time. You can develop procedures and tools to track compliance procedures and results.
Schedule a demo to experience how process automation can bring ‘zen’ to your compliance monitoring and reporting.