Hyperproof Releases New Features to Help Organizations Prepare for Compliance Audits
Today, we’re excited to announce the release of a new set of tools to help security and compliance teams prepare for upcoming audits and gain real-time feedback on their audit preparedness posture.
The Problem: It’s Difficult to Know How Prepared You Actually Are for An Audit
Preparing for an audit can be an incredibly time consuming endeavor for a compliance team.
At this moment, many compliance teams still use a hodge podge of homegrown tools — spreadsheets, cloud-based file storage systems and email — to prepare for third-party audits and security assessments (e.g. SOC 2).
With so many moving parts to a single program, knowing how prepared you are for an upcoming audit is difficult. Because information is spread across several difference systems, compliance professionals find it tough to answer to basic questions related to audit preparedness, such as:
- Do we have working controls for every requirement, or are we missing a few controls?
- Do we have up-to-date evidence for demonstrating the presence and efficacy of each control?
- Do we have back-up controls for our high risk assets?
- What documents or proof for compliance do I still need to collect?
- Which stakeholders haven’t yet completed the tasks they were supposed to complete?
- Which controls and pieces of proof do I need to review or update by the end of this week?
Answering even just one of the above questions usually requires a significant amount of investigation. When a compliance team isn’t able to get ready answers to these questions, they’re at risk of missing something an auditor deems important and getting a qualified or adverse opinion.
Here at Hyperproof, we know how important it is for compliance teams to be able to answer questions about their audit preparedness quickly and have released a set of tools to help teams achieve this goal.
Hyperproof’s Audit Preparedness Tools In Action
Let’s say you’re in the middle of preparing for an upcoming SOC 2 audit; you’ve created controls for some requirements. You have uploaded documentation to verify the effectiveness of certain controls but not all controls.
In Hyperproof, you can pull up the SOC 2 program dashboard, and in a matter of seconds, understand the status of the entire program, the work that needs attention, and when it has to be completed.
Understand how well defined a program is at a high level
You can see the current state of program definition, drill into specific categories (e.g. “In Progress” vs. “Not Started”) and start working on specific requirements or controls.
Set cadences to re-evaluate controls and keep them current
You can take a look at the “Freshness” chart, drill in to see the status of each control, and ensure you set a review policy on each control to re-evaluate its efficacy (e.g. in 30, 90, or 120 days).
Understand the efficiency of your compliance efforts
By reusing evidence across controls, and reusing “common” controls across multiple requirements, you can bring efficiencies to the management of your compliance efforts. Hyperproof helps you gauge how you’re doing in terms of efficiency.
Common controls are controls that can satisfy multiple compliance requirements. For instance, many cybersecurity frameworks have requirements around change management, they ask organizations to govern change in a sustainable and ongoing manager that involves active participation from both technology and business stakeholders to ensure that only authorized changes occur. You could make one control to satisfy multiple requirements around change management.
Head over to the “Reuse” section of a Program Dashboard to see how efficient your team is at managing your compliance efforts. Have you created any common controls that are satisfying two or more requirements?
In this example, we clicked through from the Reuse chart and found one control –CC7.2.4– that satisfies four different requirements within the SOC 2 framework. That’s a good thing because it means that we can collect evidence once for this control, and the evidence will satisfy four different requirements.
Complete all audit requests in one place
When your team has checked that all necessary controls are in place, tested and documented, it’s quite easy to then provide that evidence to your auditor for the formal assessment. You can invite your auditor to access the Audit space within their Hyperproof account by sending an email invitation. In the Audit space, the auditor will upload all of their client evidence requests. Once this is done, these requests are visible in your Hyperproof account.
From there, you can assign each request to a team member and set a due date for completing the request.
You can see progress on evidence requests in real time as team members complete their assignments.
In the case that someone hasn’t provided evidence for an audit, due to illness or other reasons, Hyperproof allows other people within the compliance team to step in and provide the requested evidence to the auditor.
Learn more
To learn more about how businesses are using Hyperproof to drive their compliance programs forward, check out our customer case studies.
If you’re an existing customer, you already have access to these dashboards and will see these features the next time you log into your Hyperproof instance.
If you are not using Hyperproof yet, you can sign up for a personalized demo to learn more about how the app can be used to improve the consistency, quality and efficiency of your compliance program.
The post Hyperproof Releases New Features to Help Organizations Prepare for Compliance Audits appeared first on Hyperproof.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Hyperproof authored by Jingcong Zhao. Read the original post at: https://hyperproof.io/resource/prepare-for-compliance-audits/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=prepare-for-compliance-audits
