Compliance automation: Why is it a critical part of your business?

For compliance leaders in 2023, the adage “do more with less” has never been more relevant. As organizations grapple with new ESG and cyber regulations, accelerating digital transformation, and generational shifts, the use case for compliance automation has become more assertive. Leaders are under mounting pressure to adopt automation technologies and data analytics to remain compliant with the constant changes imposed by regulators.

While hiring may have been the solution to manage increased regulations, the ongoing economic downturn has led to tighter budgets. Leaders are now waking up to the importance of automation to reduce the cost of compliance. A study by PwC found that a 15% increase in automation can yield up to a 10% decrease in the cost of compliance.

Forward-looking companies have already started implementing automation to keep up with the escalating complexities of compliance requirements, reduce the workload on the overworked compliance teams, deliver meaningful insights, and maximize the value of compliance and risk management.

Establishing the business case for tech-enabled compliance automation

At its simplest, compliance automation is used to automate manual processes and predictable workflows such as:

• Incident management
• Risk assessment and mitigation
• Regulatory change management
• Privacy compliance
• Regulatory audit management

Key benefits of automating compliance processes for businesses:

Significant reduction in the time taken to become compliant

Automated compliance software helps implement and monitor security controls for a particular business, industry, team, security procedure, and business objective. Automated workflows manage parts of the compliance management procedure, such as compliance reporting, escalation of non-compliance issues, and better visibility of upcoming compliance risks and regulations. Ultimately, due diligence and accuracy not only reduce the reputational impact of non-compliance but also make the organization compliance-ready. By automating repetitive compliance management tasks, the time taken to become compliant is reduced from 6-12 months to 2-4 weeks.

Cuts down compliance costs

A modernized approach to compliance management involves better visibility, automated documentation, and cutting through multiple layers of security requirements. The result is higher levels of compliance, with the costs coming down from $200,000 to $10,000-20,000.
Compliance automation provides consistency, transparency, and security by streamlining the compliance process. The single source of truth aligns comparable controls across multiple employments.

Monitoring real-time compliance posture

For a good reason, governance, risk, and compliance are the major impediments to organizations moving to the cloud. Even a single misconfigured security group can lead to a serious data breach, owing to the complexity of cloud environments.
Unfortunately, cloud misconfigurations were the leading cause of cloud security breaches in 2020, and millions of database servers are currently exposed across cloud providers. Compliance automation allows companies to easily track in real-time the compliance posture of their production environment, automate third-party audit evidence collection, and catch misconfigurations that make organizations vulnerable to attacks.

Risk assessment and remediation

Considering the increasing reliance of a business on digital systems for their daily operations, the safety of the organization’s digital assets is critical. Properly conducted risk assessments and remediation ensure the continued safety of digital assets.
Manually conducting risk assessment and remediation becomes cumbersome and erroneous. By automating repetitive parts of risk assessment and remediation efforts, organizations stand a chance to make the entire process seamless.
A major factor responsible for making risk assessment complicated and insurmountable using manual means is that cyber risks can come from any corner of the world. It is imperative for businesses to maintain constant vigilance. This can be done through compliance automation in the form of systematic and periodically repeated risk assessments with appropriate methods of risk remediation.

Powerful regulatory and compliance reporting

In the course of conducting surveys, it has been observed that regulatory and compliance reporting still remains an activity carried out manually. Organizations continue to adopt a take-it-on-the-fly approach. However, compliance automation simplifies the process of report generation. Automated systems make report generation flawless and remove latency with up-to-date reports, which helps in the process of conforming to regulatory compliance.

Reduces financial risks while fulfilling legal obligations

Compliance managers juggle on multiple fronts at the same time. Ranging from document retention, cybersecurity, managing internal controls, and regulatory reporting, there is a lot that often lean compliance management teams execute.
Even a single error can lead to regulatory violations accompanied by fines and penalties. What is important to remember is that not all instances of non-compliance have the same consequences, but each situation will result in some sort of penalty which could lead to punitive damages to the business.
For example, a GDPR violation fine can range from 20 million euros to 4% of the company’s global turnover. Automating compliance management can reduce financial, personal and legal risks.

A vision for the future: Automating compliance management using next-generation software

Compliance management is in need of a makeover. To counter the constantly changing regulatory demands and identify risks, companies can no longer rely on outdated processes and disconnected data sources. The need of the hour is a scalable compliance automation software that brings together structured and unstructured data while allowing compliance teams to monitor, manage, and report regulatory compliance and risk management.
Continuous security and compliance planning platform Sprinto helps organizations bring their compliance programs to the level regulators, customers, and stakeholders expect. The next-generation compliance software automates manual tasks, reduces risks through surveillance, derives deeper insights through timely data, and frees up time for value-added decisions.
Compared to traditional spreadsheet-based compliance management, Sprinto enables compliance automation for tech companies by putting their compliance programs on autopilot. It integrates with cloud setup for risk consolidation, maps entry-level controls, and runs fully-automated checks to prompt remediation and ensure compliance in real-time.
Hexnode is another great tool that helps with compliance automation. As a Unified Endpoint Management solution, Hexnode helps organizations securely manage all their devices while adhering to compliance, industry, and legal standards and regulations. The comprehensive UEM solution offers a host of features ranging from policy management, compliance scanning, configuration management, and audit trails that can effectively bring compliance across all devices under a single fold.

Future-proofing the business with compliance automation

Although the path to compliance automation contains unique challenges, organizations cannot fall behind on compliance: the penalties are heavy. Compliance automation allows the business to focus on innovation and the business needs. The benefits of enhanced efficiency and agility that compliance automation affords are critical to maintaining a distinctive edge in the current market.

Featured resource

Simplifying Compliance: An Actionable Guide for IT

This actionable guide for IT takes out the complexity of being compliant by providing a step-by-step guide on what your IT team needs to be aware of when implementing the best security measures specific to your organization and industry standards.

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