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With the adoption of cutting-edge technology in modern enterprises, the door is wide open for emerging and old cybersecurity concerns. Addressing these cyber threats requires specific regulations and rules to govern the cybersecurity processes and ensure businesses won’t break down under cyberattacks.
Businesses typically implement an internal cybersecurity strategy built by experts in the field to overcome potential cyber threats. However, achieving the utmost cybersecurity also requires compliance with certain industry-specific laws, standards, and rules, referred to as cybersecurity compliance.
This article discusses the definition of compliance management in cyber security and its features and benefits.
What is Compliance Management in Cybersecurity?
Generally, compliance is defined as adhering to regulations and meeting benchmarks in the business world. In the same context, cybersecurity compliance refers to aligning a company’s cybersecurity measures with pre-defined cybersecurity guidelines. It is not dependent on a single law or standard but rather on the cybersecurity industry and its own regulations.
Cybersecurity compliance management protects data and user information from cyberattacks by assisting the company in ensuring all information technology initiatives, workflows, and internal policies follow cybersecurity safety regulations. Since the surface of cybersecurity threats is continuously expanding, cybersecurity compliance management is an ongoing process.
Why is Compliance Management Important in Cybersecurity?
1. Compliance Management Helps Avoid Penalties and Fines
Laws and regulations are constantly changing, creating new ones, making it difficult for any company to keep up. Compliance management assists in staying up to date and complying with those laws to avoid severe fines and penalties.
2. Compliance Management Builds Customer Trust and Brand Reputation
Cyberattacks can be the reason behind financial losses, destroying a company’s reputation, causing catastrophic sensitive data leakage, and much more. Compliance management enables businesses to detect, mitigate, and prepare for cybersecurity incidents, thereby increasing the customer’s trust in a company and its activities.
3. Compliance Management Improves Data Management
Compliance management entails adhering to data security regulations. Companies must implement effective data management policies to organize various customer information activities. A strict plan must be developed to manage how and where to store, edit, access the data and define groups of users who have access to different categories of information.
Common Challenges Facing Cybersecurity Compliance Management
Rapid Technological Evolution
As technology evolves, new advances are being made daily, making it difficult for organizations to keep up, leaving gaps in cybersecurity that cybercriminals can exploit.
The Attack Surface is Extending Rapidly
While adopting new technology, such as cloud hosting, streamlines workflows, it negatively impacts them. The new technology opens up brand-new opportunities for cyberattacks, as cybercriminals will exploit any flaw to gain unauthorized access. Moreover, cybercriminals benefit from new technology, improving their tactics.
Cybersecurity Solutions Cannot be Scaled
While scaling is a primary goal for businesses, cybersecurity strategies must catch up accordingly. Potential lag prevents organizations from detecting new cyber vulnerabilities due to recent cyberattack advances.
The Complexity of the System
With employees working in geographically dispersed infrastructures, the new online work model has complicated the work environment; therefore, cybersecurity experts must manage information flow and security in a larger workspace.
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What are the Steps For Building a Cybersecurity Compliance Plan?
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1. Establish a Compliance Team
The first step is establishing a dedicated team to monitor the most recent regulations updates and maintain business cybersecurity compliance. Cybersecurity experts and administrative team members from related departments will be part of the team. In order to streamline teamwork, ownership and responsibilities must be clear and specific.
2. Define Compliance Requirements
It is the most time-consuming step because it requires highlighting the various compliance requirements from multiple regulations to which the business is subject. Using a checklist for each regulation will make the process more efficient.
3. Assess Vulnerabilities
Outline and list all existing weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and risk levels. It will help create the necessary cybersecurity controls. Document all findings and procedures to make them easier to follow and carry out. Prioritization of risks will also help the process.
4. Set Up Security Policies And Procedures
Implement the previously mentioned cybersecurity measures in this step. While some response action plans will be clearly drafted, others will be left to cybersecurity experts to take the appropriate action based on the nature of the attack.
5. Monitor and Update
Compliance management is an ongoing process that cannot be set and forgotten! The team will monitor security measures, keep them up to date to comply with the new rules and regulations and be prepared to detect and respond to any new threats.
Cybersecurity Compliance Management Software
Nowadays, many software solutions provide cybersecurity compliance management on various scales. Dedicated solutions make it easier for cybersecurity experts to focus on cyberattacks instead of following up on standards and regulation updates. However, most of these solutions are designed for experts, and only cybersecurity professionals can understand their interfaces and detailed reports.
Salience by Humanize offers comprehensive cybersecurity services, including compliance management. It provides a user-friendly interface for executive managers and non-cybersecurity professionals to track compliance issues and learn about their financial impacts in detail.
Conclusion
Compliance management helps defend the company, avoid unnecessary fines and penalties, and preserve its reputation and consumer trust; it is a continuous process, and must be closely monitored and kept up to date.
