Most large-scale entities need to prove compliance with multiple regulatory standards. In their efforts to meet their compliance mandates, organizations could suffer a major drain on their time and resources. This possibility holds true regardless of whether they’re finance companies, retailers, manufacturers or hospitality firms.

Organizations face an additional obstacle when they have an internally created compliance standard that demands enforcement. These types of standards require the same level of monitoring as regulatory policies. They also necessitate adoption across the same varied, dispersed and ever-evolving IT infrastructure.

Lastly, there’s a challenge in the fact that organizations’ business objectives are always changing. So too are the types of technologies that are available to them. Such dynamism creates many reasons why businesses might ultimately be required to supplement their current compliance program with additional policies down the road.

In their attempt to take all of these factors into consideration, many organizations could end up with an excess of tools applied piecemeal across their estate. More complexity is the last thing they need. Instead, they need to embrace a customizable approach to their compliance obligations that’s capable shifting dynamically as corporate needs expand or change.

This flexible approach should consist of the following three best practices.

Best Practice #1: Centralize Your Compliance Efforts

As stated above, organizations should strive to avoid sinking their resources into managing and maintaining different vendors for different compliance requirements. Instead, they might consider investing in a single tool and applying it across their entire IT environment. That’s as long as the tool allows them to use both a customized combination of policies along with internal policies that are relevant to them.

As an example, an organization may need to be able to prove continuous compliance with PCI-DSS and ISO 27001 in addition to an internally created corporate compliance (Read more...)