Beyond the Basics: How to Mature Your Compliance Program

As your business grows and matures, your security and compliance program should grow with it. But what does that mean in practice?

For a compliance program to scale effectively, business leaders and their security teams must take a close look at the policies and procedures currently in place within their organizations and think proactively about what needs to be done to ensure the company is equipped to adapt to new challenges and shifting priorities as the business grows. 

Here are nine steps business leaders can take to start developing more mature cybersecurity and compliance programs:

1. Build and retain a strong security team.
Whether you’re working toward your first formal cybersecurity attestation or your goal is to maintain compliance in the year ahead, having the right people in the right seats at your organization is critical for achieving your compliance goals. 

At the start-up stage, members of your security team might wear many different hats within your organization, from managing day-to-day operations to providing technical support. But as your business grows, you may choose to expand your security team to include dedicated security practitioners, external consultants, legal experts, and even communications professionals who work to ensure your stakeholders are well-informed about your efforts to secure their data.

Depending on the size of your organization, you might choose to hire a full-time chief information security officer (CISO) or virtual CISO (vCISO) to manage your security program. In all cases, you’ll want to have people in your corner who understand the regulatory landscape and can ensure your organization is prepared to respond to new and existing threats.

Just as important as recruiting top cybersecurity talent is retaining that talent. For business leaders, this means providing team members with opportunities for advancement and ongoing professional development to build on their existing skills. Technology never stops evolving, so continued learning is crucial to ensure your security team stays on the cutting edge. 

2. Define accountability within your organization.

Once you have the right team in place, your next task is defining accountability. Ultimately, the responsibility of keeping an organization’s systems secure falls on top-level leadership—the decision-makers. Your CISO (or vCISO) and their team can offer guidance to help mitigate risk, but their role is to implement strategies that are approved at the board level. This means a mature security program must start at the top of the organizational chart.

Business leaders should first define a clear budget and goals for their organization’s security program, then work with members of their security team to craft and execute plans to reach those goals. Even if you don’t yet have a dedicated data security team in place, it’s important to document who within your organization “owns” each aspect of your security and compliance program, from managing day-to-day operations to collecting documentation for security assessments like SOC 2. Defining roles early in your security journey will help your organization be better prepared for continued growth in the years to come.

3. Outline clear KPIs to measure your progress.

While a compliance audit can provide valuable insight into an organization’s security posture over a specified period, cybersecurity must be continuously measured. Work closely with your security team to define key performance indicators (KPIs) that will allow you to keep a close eye on your progress throughout the year so you don’t end up with any surprises in your auditor’s final report. 

For best results, design KPIs that are both measurable and actionable. What does success look like in your compliance program? What security commitments have you made to customers? Use the answers to these questions to craft KPIs that will help you and your team get a clear picture of your security program’s strengths and areas for improvement.

4. Re-evaluate your cybersecurity and compliance budget.

As your organization matures, leaders should frequently re-examine the budget allocated to cybersecurity and compliance. While some organizations choose to stick to a percentage of their overall IT budget, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. 

When determining your security and compliance budget, consider the value of your data and the potential cost of a breach. Cyber attacks may not just hurt your bottom line, but can also affect your reputation—and repairing a company’s public image is no small feat. There may also be expenses associated with recovering data that is lost. Investing in security and compliance early will pay dividends down the line.

Leaders working to craft the budget for a mature compliance program should also take into account their short- and long-term cybersecurity goals as well as the tools and resources required to achieve them. Will you need to budget for a new software tool? Do you need to hire additional team members to manage your growing security program?

Above all, your top priority should be your customers. Don’t think of your cybersecurity budget as the cost of achieving or maintaining compliance against an industry standard. Instead, it’s the cost of keeping your stakeholders’ data secure. Investing in cybersecurity and compliance shows that your organization truly cares about your customers’ safety and privacy.

5. Consider enlisting the help of external partners.

Businesses at all stages of growth can benefit from partnering with external organizations to enhance their security posture. At the start-up stage, this could mean enlisting the help of a team of cybersecurity consultants to help you prepare for your first audit or attestation. In a more mature security program, this might look like partnering with a penetration testing firm to get a clearer picture of potential gaps in your identity and access management practices. Larger or enterprise organizations that have already taken this step might also consider partnering with a firm to conduct red-team and blue-team exercises, which are designed to help identify weaknesses in an organization’s security posture while giving security practitioners hands-on experience with incident response.

The resources required to complete these kinds of activities will often grow with your organization. For instance, while a start-up might benefit from an affordable, open-source tool for vulnerability scanning, the process is much more complicated at the enterprise level. Identifying partners who understand your company’s current needs and challenges can help you uncover new insights and pave the way to long-term cyber resiliency.

6. Manage your technical debt.

In the world of IT, “technical debt” accrues when you delay taking an action that would save you or your team time down the line. Technical debt can include things like:

• Lingering bugs and glitches

• Weak governance

• Poor system visibility

• Old hardware assets

• Missing documentation

For instance, by failing to document code as it’s written, developers may struggle to unravel their own work months down the line. A development team might also add to their technical debt by failing to think proactively about cybersecurity during the design phase of a new project, forcing them to spend more time implementing controls later on.

If you’ve reached the point where maturing your compliance program is top-of-mind, your organization has likely already amassed at least some technical debt. In many ways, it’s inevitable—you can’t foresee every possible scenario. But whether you tackle it internally or call in an outside firm for help, managing your company’s technical debt and working strategically to avoid creating new debt can help boost team morale, shorten your sales cycle, and potentially prevent a data breach. You might even consider investing in a software tool to help detect technical debt so you and your team can quash it before it spirals into a much bigger problem.

7. Embrace new technology, like compliance automation platforms, to help you reach your security goals.

The size of your internal security team will likely grow with your business—and with more cooks in the kitchen, a compliance automation tool like Audora can be a game-changer. Audora helps streamline the cybersecurity auditing process by allowing auditing firms and their clients to work asynchronously, making for faster evidence collection and smoother communication throughout each engagement. By spending less time chasing down documents, auditors and business leaders can spend more time looking at the big picture and planning for new developments in security and compliance.

Automation tools can also help you mature your compliance program by paving the way to smoother concurrent and subsequent audits. For instance, Audora allows auditors to map controls to multiple standards or frameworks, making it easier to complete multiple cybersecurity assessments simultaneously. And because Audora keeps records of previous years’ audits, the improved efficiency only compounds year over year.

Cybersecurity leaders should also consider the potential benefits of implementing artificial intelligence tools to improve security outcomes. Used correctly, AI tools can automate tasks related to access management, break down complex regulatory requirements into simpler language, and even assist with real-time security monitoring by identifying errors and potential threats as they arise.

As technology adapts and evolves, so do the strategies employed by bad actors who want to wreak havoc on your systems. Taking advantage of AI technology and compliance automation tools can help your team keep up-to-date on shifts in the regulatory landscape and stay one step ahead of cybercriminals.

8. Start planning for the future.

As a business leader, you likely already have a vision of where your company and its security strategy are headed in the years to come. Now that you’re in the throes of building a more mature compliance program, it’s time to turn those big ideas into plans of action. For companies that have already completed a SOC 2 examination, this might mean pursuing compliance against an additional security framework, like ISO 27001. Start by researching the standards and frameworks that you and your team might want to implement over the next two years so you know what’s required to achieve compliance and can chart a clear path forward.

9. Foster a culture of continuous improvement.

Regardless of whether your organization is just starting on its compliance journey or you already have a full-fledged security team in place, there’s still a long road ahead when it comes to keeping your customers’ data secure. In an ever-changing field like cybersecurity, creating a culture that embraces learning and continuous improvement is crucial to ensure your organization is prepared to adapt to new threats and shifting regulatory requirements.

As a security leader, you might start small by encouraging your team to read industry publications and setting up regular meetings to report back on what they’ve learned. As your team grows, you could earmark a portion of your cybersecurity budget for attending in-person conferences and training sessions and ask team members to share their greatest takeaways. You might even choose to incentivize members of your security team to attain new industry certifications to bolster their knowledge of new developments in the field.

To truly embrace a culture of learning and continuous improvement, you’ll need buy-in from more than just the security team, however. All members of an organization should receive frequent training on cybersecurity best practices to ensure they understand their roles in securing stakeholders’ data. Avoid monotonous online modules and instead strive to create engaging educational activities that allow team members to share their experiences and ask questions. By keeping lines of communication open, employees can feel more confident in reporting suspected threats, like phishing attempts, and are more likely to prioritize security in their day-to-day roles.

Above all, the key to continuously improving data security within your organization is adopting a mindset of adaptability from top to bottom. With technology continuing to advance at lightning speeds, it's impossible to predict what the threat landscape will look like months or years from now. Instead, create a culture where the status quo isn’t good enough and where learning is paramount, and your team will be set up for success.

The Bottom Line

Developing a mature compliance program requires business leaders to have a clear vision for the future and an actionable plan to get their team there. By thinking ahead, adopting a culture of continuous improvement, and allocating the right resources to get the job done, security teams of all sizes can build mature compliance programs that are well-equipped to keep customers’ data secure in the face of new challenges and threats.

No matter what stage of growth your business is in, Audora can help you and your audit firm streamline your upcoming audit so you can reach your compliance goals. Schedule a call with us today to learn more.