Continuous Monitoring for Cybersecurity Compliance: Tools and Tactics
Compliance isn’t just a check-the-box exercise—it requires continuous monitoring and improvement year after year. Continuous compliance monitoring involves tracking compliance performance, identifying potential issues, and creating solutions to address those issues. It also refers to the quality assurance tests used to check how well business operations meet regulatory and internal process obligations. In other words, continuously monitoring an organization’s compliance ensures its operations are working as they should.
A report by Proofpoint indicated that nearly 70% of CISOs feel their organization is at risk of experiencing a material cyber attack in the next 12 months. While annual audits will help your organization demonstrate your commitment to cybersecurity best practices, implementing a continuous compliance monitoring strategy is a key aspect of maintaining compliance throughout the year. Unlike assessments completed by an independent third-party auditor, compliance monitoring is less structured and happens from within the organization. In the same way a gardener must routinely check the progress and prognosis of his plants, continuous monitoring allows an organization to consistently and internally monitor its unique environment.
Let’s examine in more detail why a compliance monitoring program is essential in today’s business landscape, how compliance monitoring tools help increase efficiency, and how to integrate a monitoring plan into an organization’s policy and procedures.
Why is Compliance Monitoring Important?
The regulatory compliance landscape changes quickly, and keeping up with its evolutions can be difficult. That, in turn, can increase the risk of non-compliance—resulting in the possibility of financial losses, lawsuits, fines, and even a damaged reputation. A continuous monitoring strategy will ensure controls are operating correctly and the organization is following protocol for any laws and regulations with which it needs to comply. Compliance monitoring helps alert organizations of any issues or security breaches immediately and spells out control requirements in a digestible way.
Compliance monitoring can also be essential for organizations with a limited information security team. Using varied compliance monitoring strategies will help teams gain the appropriate structure for risk management solutions. For instance, the technical side of compliance monitoring includes monitoring controls, operations, and specific audit requirements like SOC 2 criteria and ISO 27001 controls. There’s also a human element to compliance monitoring, including security awareness training and ensuring associates follow company policies and procedures.
Industries that Benefit from Compliance Monitoring
An effective compliance monitoring program helps organizations demonstrate their accountability to internal and external stakeholders, regulatory bodies, and customers. This is particularly important in industries such as healthcare and finance, where data privacy is critical.
For example, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires healthcare providers to safeguard patients’ electronic protected health information (ePHI). For healthcare organizations, compliance monitoring involves reviewing records, observing processes, and conducting audits to ensure proper procedures are in place to protect patient data. Monitoring would also involve training employees on HIPAA regulations and conducting regular assessments to identify potential risks or non-compliant areas.
In the financial industry, where companies must comply with regulations related to fraud prevention, compliance monitoring involves reviewing transactions and records, conducting audits and inspections, and implementing proper training and procedures to detect and prevent illegal activities.
Positive Impacts of Compliance Monitoring
Now that you know why compliance monitoring is important, let’s explore some of the ongoing, positive impacts of a cybersecurity monitoring program that can benefit any organization.
Demonstrates compliant policies and procedures: By continuously documenting compliance processes, monitoring can help organizations prove they have the correct procedures in place. This can help mitigate the negative impact of non-compliance issues if they arise.
Scales business and improves customer trust: Monitoring is an essential first step to improve business. Understanding where an organization stands is a vital starting point for improvement, allowing it to identify and remediate gaps continuously and confidently. Through these procedures, organizations can increase sale cycles and overall customer trust.
Establishes regulatory compliance: In many cases, demonstrating a robust and comprehensive compliance monitoring program is integral to retaining compliance regulation requirements.
Improve Monitoring with Compliance Automation
Before compliance automation, report preparation was completed manually, and monitoring was either done in person or by listening to telephone recordings. This limitation meant there was always the possibility of undetected issues. Today, compliance automation helps to manage and reduce risks. With the right tools, organizations can continually and automatically track new or updated regulations, allowing for quicker responses to changes without the burden of manual techniques.
Key Features to Look for In Compliance Monitoring Tools
Compliance monitoring tools allow teams to implement automatic and continuously monitored control frameworks that not only remediate issues but also demonstrate compliance for stakeholders. Look at some key features to consider when choosing a compliance monitoring tool.
Real-time Alerts: A good compliance monitoring tool delivers real-time alerts on important changes to sensitive data and can continually respond to events that match predetermined risk conditions.
Scalability and Flexibility: Even with automation, a manual component will always exist. The configurations should allow compliance team members to monitor parameters and highlight issues that need continual investigation.
Integration Capabilities: Compliance automation is meant to free a team from manual and repetitive tasks, helping to focus on the bigger picture—like policy creation, employee training, regulation review, and creating compliance strategy. When looking for a compliance monitoring tool, find a platform that best integrates with critical systems—like infrastructure and change management tools, HR, CRM, or expense systems—for optimal efficiency.
Reports and Deliverables: Reports are a significant component of compliance automation platforms. As you research compliance software, look for systems with reporting options, such as saving preferred layouts and common reports so organizations can share them across their team for improved efficiency.
How to Get Started with Compliance Monitoring Tools
There are currently many options for compliance monitoring tools on the market. While finding the systems that work for a specific organization’s needs is essential, there’s also the task of getting started. We’ve provided a few tips for deciding on the best compliance monitoring tools and making them work for specific business environments.
Research, research, research: Taking the first step often means conducting a search on individual platforms. Reading reviews for different automation tools and scoping out the difference in platforms will help organizations get the best tool for their team and clients.
Scope out what’s not needed: Along with studying options, it’s important to figure out what isn’t needed. Automation platforms differ from industry to industry, and there are a great deal of options out there. By minimizing what tools don’t fit an organization’s needs first, you can narrow the scope to what will benefit the organization the most.
Get buy-in from senior management: Security is often a top-down process. When organizations have the green light for security automation from leadership, those processes and best practices often trickle down to the rest of the team. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.
Creating a Compliance Monitoring Plan
While there’s no specific template for monitoring risks, creating a continuous compliance monitoring plan appropriate for an organization’s particular requirements can help you establish the correct processes and ensure regulatory compliance.
Here are a few key elements to consider when creating a robust compliance monitoring program:
Form an information security committee: This could include engineering, legal, HR, and IT teams and a dedicated project leader responsible for specific parts of the compliance monitoring strategy.
Complete a risk assessment: First, it’s essential to understand an organization’s weaknesses and complete due diligence processes of anticipating, identifying, and addressing cyber risks. Conducting a risk assessment will help all parties involved as you integrate and improve the compliance monitoring strategy.
Create a budget and timeframe: Having a clear understanding of how much time and resources you’re able to spend on a compliance monitoring strategy will help an organization create a clear and achievable plan.
Understand the goals: Know the requirements for the reports and certifications you are trying to achieve and the laws and regulations applicable to the organization. While you don’t need to monitor everything, consider what applies to the specific environment.
Create a solid inventory: Document and continually update what’s in the environment, such as operating systems, hardware, etc.
Include target dates and respond quickly to risks: Create goals for completing specific monitoring tasks. As you meet these goals, you can better decide if the controls are working as expected or need further adjustment.
Continuous compliance monitoring doesn’t have to be complicated. With the correct planning and support, organizations across industries and of all sizes can integrate a robust compliance monitoring strategy that applies to their specific environment.
Contact us today to learn more about how to enhance efficiency and accuracy in your compliance program.
