What is Compliance Tracking?
Compliance tracking is a monitoring process that ensures that compliance requirements are being met and identifies new compliance risks. Compliance tracking aims to ensure that regulatory compliance requirements are satisfied while upholding data security and privacy. Through a dynamic process, which includes the monitoring, assessment, and analysis of organizational performance and risk indicators, teams can pinpoint areas of non-compliance and take corrective action to prevent costly violations.
You can think of compliance monitoring programs as quality assurance tests of sorts that organizations will perform to check the alignment of their business with regulatory obligations.
Compliance tracking is the implementation of a process that continuously monitors IT assets to verify that they meet regulatory security requirements. Maintaining a tight security posture in the face of regulatory standards becomes doable with compliance tracking.
Is Compliance Monitoring Necessary?
At times, compliance tracking is a legal requirement of its own.
For example, in the UK, the UK Financial Conduct Authority requires evidence of compliance tracking and a written plan before getting licensed for business in the financial market. In other words, checking compliance boxes is not enough to achieve compliance; you need a thorough understanding of requirements and most importantly, constant oversight of how the requirements have changed or evolved.
New regulations such as the GDPR require more than just a point-in-time snapshot of the state of security. They require evidence of ongoing control monitoring and cloud assessment. Currently, the US Department of Defense is rolling out a new cybersecurity program focused on ensuring continuous compliance monitoring for firms in the defense supply chain. Adhering to this new era of standards that require constant compliance monitoring demands a tremendous investment of capital and human resources.
Even in the absence of regulations, organizations may choose to use compliance monitoring to avoid paying expensive fines for violations. Regulators levy steep fines on even minor offenses because the organization didn’t put in place the necessary safeguards.
Why is Compliance Tracking and Reporting So Important?
Compliance monitoring software is an excellent assessment mechanism that repeatedly validates that compliance configurations are working as expected.
Planning and implementing excellent security configurations and then manually managing controls undermines a system and does not guarantee that controls remain configured as expected over time. Even periodic or annual control assessments and audits are not sufficient to address the dynamic nature of today’s business environment because:
- They capture a static snapshot of a single point in time. This means that in between periodic checks, major security incidents may have happened without our knowledge.
- The quality of these assessments is decreased if it is prone to human error or mismanagement.
- They are costly and time-consuming.
These insufficiencies can have a serious impact on business operations and information security programs. Lags in control assessments hamper critical processes and expose the organization as a target for new threats.
Using automation, organizations can identify when the system is not up to par to meet security and privacy standards. It can then react appropriately to remediate the security concern. Continuous tracking identifies hidden system components, misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and unauthorized actions.
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Centraleyes for Free
See for yourself how the Centraleyes platform exceeds anything an old GRC
system does and eliminates the need for manual processes and spreadsheets
to give you immediate value and run a full risk assessment in less than 30 days
Best Practices for Compliance Tracking Systems
- Make sure your solution fits the needs of your organization
- Create a culture of compliance
- Conduct regular employee and management training sessions
- Ensure that teams are using the system correctly
How To Implement Compliance Tracking
To properly monitor a wide range of controls across a business domain, an organization needs to have a single repository that documents and manages its controls and gathers evidence of their effectiveness.
A compliance tracking system has connectors to common business applications across IT, development, security, HR, sales, and finance and can pull pertinent data about many types of controls into its platform for streamlined controls assessment and validation. Monitoring makes it easy to simplify workflows that manage alarms, communicate to the board, investigate alerts, and remediate or mitigate control weaknesses.
Ensure Ongoing Compliance with Centraleyes
Periodically reassessing your frameworks can be crucial to ensure your ongoing compliance and risk posture. With Centraleyes you can easily automate any reassessment tasks down to the individual question level at the click of a button. Put an emphasis on your critical controls and make sure they are never missed.
For each framework or question, you can set up as many reassessment cadences as you’d like by simply setting dates in the frequency of your choice. The platform will automatically send out notifications to control owners when it is time to reassess the questions they’ve been assigned to.
With this simple yet powerful feature, Centraleyes empowers you to streamline your compliance process and ensure timely review through automated reassessments.
Start Getting Value With
Centraleyes for Free
See for yourself how the Centraleyes platform exceeds anything an old GRC
system does and eliminates the need for manual processes and spreadsheets
to give you immediate value and run a full risk assessment in less than 30 days
