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Demonstrating a strong security posture is becoming increasingly important for building trust. Customers look for proof of comprehensive coverage, and to meet demands, organizations need to comply with a growing number of security standards.
However, compliance with multiple frameworks introduces the possibility of overlapping controls, often leading to duplicative work and wasted effort.
Compliance software offers a solution through framework cross-mapping. It allows organizations to map common controls or requirements across different frameworks, streamlining workflows and ensuring better resource allocation.
In this article, we’ll explore the concept of cross-mapping by explaining:
- What cross-mapping is
- The most commonly paired frameworks
- How cross-mapping benefits your organization
What is framework mapping?
Framework mapping is the process of identifying common or overlapping controls across multiple security and privacy frameworks. The goal is to allow your teams to reuse established controls and artifacts like screenshots, logs, and policies to demonstrate compliance without duplicative work.
Cross-mapping provides a competitive business advantage to organizations scaling their GRC programs. It allows them to pinpoint gaps during the mapping process and focus their efforts in those areas, quickly achieving readiness for additional frameworks.
For example, both SOC 2 and ISO 27001 require clearly defined incident response, data management, and data backup procedures. Instead of developing separate procedures for each standard, you can identify overlapping requirements and reuse aligned controls where appropriate, provided they meet the depth and rigor required by each framework.
The two primary cross-mapping methods are:
- Manual: Your compliance teams use a matrix or Excel sheet to map existing controls to their equivalents in other frameworks
- Automated: Automation-enabled GRC software identifies which implemented controls meet criteria for multiple frameworks
Manual mapping can be sufficient for small organizations, but it becomes increasingly difficult to manage as your compliance obligations scale.
{{cta_withimage24="/cta-blocks"}} | How to choose the right continuous compliance solution
Frequently paired regulatory and industry standard frameworks
Depending on the industry, your organization needs to comply with different frameworks and regulations. While these standards are not officially paired, they are often implemented together to address different aspects of compliance, including security and privacy, ensuring more complete coverage.
Adopting these combinations has become common practice to meet industry expectations and demonstrate a robust security posture.
For example, a healthcare SaaS company may need to comply with HIPAA for patient data, ISO 27001 for general information security, and SOC 2 to meet customer expectations, all of which share overlapping technical controls.
The table below shows the most frequently combined industry standard and regulatory frameworks:
Many of these frameworks share requirements, making them ideal for cross-mapping. This way, you can pursue multiple compliance attestations efficiently without duplicating your workflows.
How cross-mapping streamlines multi-framework compliance
The usefulness of cross-mapping goes beyond eliminating duplicative work. Once fully integrated into your compliance workflows, it also offers the following benefits:
- Streamlined compliance processes
- Enhanced risk mitigation
- Improved audit readiness
- More efficient reporting
- Adaptability to regulatory changes
We’ll explore each benefit and the role framework mapping plays in achieving them in the sections below.
1. Streamlined compliance processes
Compliance cross-mapping eliminates the need to balance spreadsheets and programs dedicated to individual frameworks. Instead, your compliance, security, and IT teams can access all relevant information from a single requirement or evidence reference, making the process more straightforward.
This also supports continuous compliance by making it easier to monitor your control status. Having all compliance data in a single interface provides a clear overview of how your controls meet your stakeholders' compliance requirements.
Streamlining your compliance processes also translates into long-term savings. Without cross-mapping, your controls are located across siloed departments and technologies, creating a fragmented view of your security status. This often results in duplicative workflows and oversights, leading to delays, bottlenecks, and costly remediations.
2. Enhanced risk mitigation
A unified view of each framework offers deeper insight into how specific controls meet different criteria. Scaling your operations opens new risk surfaces that need to be addressed. Without cross-mapping, blind spots are harder to identify, so vulnerabilities and threats may go unnoticed and unaddressed for longer.
“
Leveraging cross-mapping provides another lens to analyze risk. Most organizations utilize cross-mapping frameworks to understand how close they are to achieving another assurance report or certification. However, the delta between frameworks can identify a legitimate need for additional controls to combat risk—this is the biggest benefit, often an output of cross-mapping”
The holistic overview you gain from cross-mapping helps mitigate risk more efficiently. With a unified view, you can quickly identify areas where your controls don’t meet compliance requirements and address them, dealing with risks before they escalate.
Increased visibility can also streamline monitoring workflows. Implementing a cross-mapped compliance solution enables real-time, continuous oversight of your compliance controls. With this up-to-date information, your teams can more efficiently allocate resources and prioritize non-compliance areas.
3. Improved audit readiness
One of the biggest challenges of compliance with multiple frameworks is preparing the necessary evidence and information for compliance audits. Cross-mapping creates a unified trail, allowing auditors to check information from a central requirement or evidence reference and eliminating the need to analyze multiple records.
Cross-mapping streamlines audit preparation by centralizing evidence that can support multiple frameworks, potentially reducing auditor effort, but distinct audits are still required for each attestation or certification. With all compliance evidence centrally managed, auditors can review how your controls measure against requirements for multiple frameworks, saving time and resources.
Without cross-mapping, audits become more complex. Teams need to sift through individual programs and departments to find evidence, taking away time from other strategic tasks and increasing the risk of delays, oversights, and other inefficiencies.
4. More efficient reporting
Generating reports across multiple frameworks requires collecting data from different systems, teams, and departments. This process is time-consuming and increases the risk of missing essential information. With cross-mapping enabled, you can generate a consolidated report that demonstrates your compliance posture across several frameworks.
Continuous monitoring also makes reporting more efficient. Collecting fragmented data can result in point-in-time snapshots, which may be outdated by the time a report is generated. Continuous oversight ensures your data is current, enabling your teams to act using the most recent information as guidance.
Cross-mapping also helps minimize human error. By centralizing information, your compliance teams don’t have to reference information between multiple sources before creating a report, minimizing the risk of outdated data and oversights.
5. Adaptability to regulatory changes
Frameworks constantly evolve to deal with emerging threats. Ongoing compliance means regularly reassessing your compliance posture and determining whether your existing controls meet updated compliance criteria.
This is particularly important if you operate in a highly regulated industry like healthcare, finance, or the public sector. These industries have rigorous security and privacy requirements through standards such as HIPAA and CMMC, and violating them can result in severe financial penalties or even legal action.
Ensuring your compliance controls are up-to-date by manually tracking compliance is complex. Your compliance teams need to invest considerable time and resources to perform the necessary workflows, pulling them away from other high-priority and time-sensitive tasks.
With cross-mapping, you can automatically update requirements and identify areas that need adjustment. It makes the process more efficient, as your teams can now focus their effort directly where it’s needed.
{{cta_withimage8="/cta-blocks"}} | GRC implementation guide
Best practices for leveraging compliance cross-mapping efficiently
While cross-mapping offers clear benefits, integrating it with your existing systems requires proactive planning. Here’s how to ensure you’re getting the most value from the process:
- Implement a centralized compliance repository: Establish a single source of truth that stakeholders can access for compliance information. Making information accessible from one location minimizes the risk of duplicative workflows and streamlines control referencing.
- Train teams to understand cross-mapping: Ensure your stakeholders understand cross-mapping by training them on framework overlap and ways to interpret control relationships.
- Regularly update control mappings to reflect any changes: Routinely review your mapped requirements and evidence to identify and address areas of non-compliance.
- Establish stakeholder accountability: Assign clear accountability trails for individual controls to teams and stakeholders. This gives them greater ownership and ensures they perform their roles more efficiently.
- Integrate cross-mapping into audit preparation: Leverage cross-mapping when preparing data for audits. Being able to review information for multiple frameworks at once reduces the preparation time and makes audits smoother.
- Leverage a scalable automation solution: As your organization grows, your compliance and regulatory requirements change. Implement an automation solution that can easily scale with your compliance needs.
How Vanta can help you achieve multi-framework compliance
Vanta is a trust and compliance management platform that makes your compliance process more efficient and saves you significant time and resources.
By leveraging the automation features and resources, you can reduce the time spent on each framework and related audits by significant margins, up to 82% according to Vanta customer benchmarks.
The platform offers dedicated products for 35+ popular frameworks, including HIPAA, CMMC, ISO 42001, ISO 27001, and GDPR. If you’re pursuing compliance with multiple frameworks simultaneously, Vanta’s built-in cross-mapping across frameworks can minimize unnecessary effort by providing pre-mapped evidence across multiple framework requirements. Additionally, you can use Vanta AI to help suggest evidence cross-mapping for controls you may want to bring into Vanta.
With Vanta, you get access to multiple helpful features that streamline your compliance efforts and help you scale more efficiently, including:
- 375+ integrations with popular software (cloud providers, CRM systems, etc.)
- 1,200+ automated, hourly tests
- Automated gap assessments
- Continuous compliance monitoring
- Automated evidence collection
See firsthand how Vanta can streamline multi-framework compliance by scheduling a custom demo.
{{cta_simple29="/cta-blocks"}} | GRC product page
Continuous control monitoring
Multi-framework mapping: A practical guide to streamlining compliance
Continuous control monitoring
Looking to upgrade to continuous, automated GRC and get visibility across your entire program?
Demonstrating a strong security posture is becoming increasingly important for building trust. Customers look for proof of comprehensive coverage, and to meet demands, organizations need to comply with a growing number of security standards.
However, compliance with multiple frameworks introduces the possibility of overlapping controls, often leading to duplicative work and wasted effort.
Compliance software offers a solution through framework cross-mapping. It allows organizations to map common controls or requirements across different frameworks, streamlining workflows and ensuring better resource allocation.
In this article, we’ll explore the concept of cross-mapping by explaining:
- What cross-mapping is
- The most commonly paired frameworks
- How cross-mapping benefits your organization
What is framework mapping?
Framework mapping is the process of identifying common or overlapping controls across multiple security and privacy frameworks. The goal is to allow your teams to reuse established controls and artifacts like screenshots, logs, and policies to demonstrate compliance without duplicative work.
Cross-mapping provides a competitive business advantage to organizations scaling their GRC programs. It allows them to pinpoint gaps during the mapping process and focus their efforts in those areas, quickly achieving readiness for additional frameworks.
For example, both SOC 2 and ISO 27001 require clearly defined incident response, data management, and data backup procedures. Instead of developing separate procedures for each standard, you can identify overlapping requirements and reuse aligned controls where appropriate, provided they meet the depth and rigor required by each framework.
The two primary cross-mapping methods are:
- Manual: Your compliance teams use a matrix or Excel sheet to map existing controls to their equivalents in other frameworks
- Automated: Automation-enabled GRC software identifies which implemented controls meet criteria for multiple frameworks
Manual mapping can be sufficient for small organizations, but it becomes increasingly difficult to manage as your compliance obligations scale.
{{cta_withimage24="/cta-blocks"}} | How to choose the right continuous compliance solution
Frequently paired regulatory and industry standard frameworks
Depending on the industry, your organization needs to comply with different frameworks and regulations. While these standards are not officially paired, they are often implemented together to address different aspects of compliance, including security and privacy, ensuring more complete coverage.
Adopting these combinations has become common practice to meet industry expectations and demonstrate a robust security posture.
For example, a healthcare SaaS company may need to comply with HIPAA for patient data, ISO 27001 for general information security, and SOC 2 to meet customer expectations, all of which share overlapping technical controls.
The table below shows the most frequently combined industry standard and regulatory frameworks:
Many of these frameworks share requirements, making them ideal for cross-mapping. This way, you can pursue multiple compliance attestations efficiently without duplicating your workflows.
How cross-mapping streamlines multi-framework compliance
The usefulness of cross-mapping goes beyond eliminating duplicative work. Once fully integrated into your compliance workflows, it also offers the following benefits:
- Streamlined compliance processes
- Enhanced risk mitigation
- Improved audit readiness
- More efficient reporting
- Adaptability to regulatory changes
We’ll explore each benefit and the role framework mapping plays in achieving them in the sections below.
1. Streamlined compliance processes
Compliance cross-mapping eliminates the need to balance spreadsheets and programs dedicated to individual frameworks. Instead, your compliance, security, and IT teams can access all relevant information from a single requirement or evidence reference, making the process more straightforward.
This also supports continuous compliance by making it easier to monitor your control status. Having all compliance data in a single interface provides a clear overview of how your controls meet your stakeholders' compliance requirements.
Streamlining your compliance processes also translates into long-term savings. Without cross-mapping, your controls are located across siloed departments and technologies, creating a fragmented view of your security status. This often results in duplicative workflows and oversights, leading to delays, bottlenecks, and costly remediations.
2. Enhanced risk mitigation
A unified view of each framework offers deeper insight into how specific controls meet different criteria. Scaling your operations opens new risk surfaces that need to be addressed. Without cross-mapping, blind spots are harder to identify, so vulnerabilities and threats may go unnoticed and unaddressed for longer.
“
Leveraging cross-mapping provides another lens to analyze risk. Most organizations utilize cross-mapping frameworks to understand how close they are to achieving another assurance report or certification. However, the delta between frameworks can identify a legitimate need for additional controls to combat risk—this is the biggest benefit, often an output of cross-mapping”
The holistic overview you gain from cross-mapping helps mitigate risk more efficiently. With a unified view, you can quickly identify areas where your controls don’t meet compliance requirements and address them, dealing with risks before they escalate.
Increased visibility can also streamline monitoring workflows. Implementing a cross-mapped compliance solution enables real-time, continuous oversight of your compliance controls. With this up-to-date information, your teams can more efficiently allocate resources and prioritize non-compliance areas.
3. Improved audit readiness
One of the biggest challenges of compliance with multiple frameworks is preparing the necessary evidence and information for compliance audits. Cross-mapping creates a unified trail, allowing auditors to check information from a central requirement or evidence reference and eliminating the need to analyze multiple records.
Cross-mapping streamlines audit preparation by centralizing evidence that can support multiple frameworks, potentially reducing auditor effort, but distinct audits are still required for each attestation or certification. With all compliance evidence centrally managed, auditors can review how your controls measure against requirements for multiple frameworks, saving time and resources.
Without cross-mapping, audits become more complex. Teams need to sift through individual programs and departments to find evidence, taking away time from other strategic tasks and increasing the risk of delays, oversights, and other inefficiencies.
4. More efficient reporting
Generating reports across multiple frameworks requires collecting data from different systems, teams, and departments. This process is time-consuming and increases the risk of missing essential information. With cross-mapping enabled, you can generate a consolidated report that demonstrates your compliance posture across several frameworks.
Continuous monitoring also makes reporting more efficient. Collecting fragmented data can result in point-in-time snapshots, which may be outdated by the time a report is generated. Continuous oversight ensures your data is current, enabling your teams to act using the most recent information as guidance.
Cross-mapping also helps minimize human error. By centralizing information, your compliance teams don’t have to reference information between multiple sources before creating a report, minimizing the risk of outdated data and oversights.
5. Adaptability to regulatory changes
Frameworks constantly evolve to deal with emerging threats. Ongoing compliance means regularly reassessing your compliance posture and determining whether your existing controls meet updated compliance criteria.
This is particularly important if you operate in a highly regulated industry like healthcare, finance, or the public sector. These industries have rigorous security and privacy requirements through standards such as HIPAA and CMMC, and violating them can result in severe financial penalties or even legal action.
Ensuring your compliance controls are up-to-date by manually tracking compliance is complex. Your compliance teams need to invest considerable time and resources to perform the necessary workflows, pulling them away from other high-priority and time-sensitive tasks.
With cross-mapping, you can automatically update requirements and identify areas that need adjustment. It makes the process more efficient, as your teams can now focus their effort directly where it’s needed.
{{cta_withimage8="/cta-blocks"}} | GRC implementation guide
Best practices for leveraging compliance cross-mapping efficiently
While cross-mapping offers clear benefits, integrating it with your existing systems requires proactive planning. Here’s how to ensure you’re getting the most value from the process:
- Implement a centralized compliance repository: Establish a single source of truth that stakeholders can access for compliance information. Making information accessible from one location minimizes the risk of duplicative workflows and streamlines control referencing.
- Train teams to understand cross-mapping: Ensure your stakeholders understand cross-mapping by training them on framework overlap and ways to interpret control relationships.
- Regularly update control mappings to reflect any changes: Routinely review your mapped requirements and evidence to identify and address areas of non-compliance.
- Establish stakeholder accountability: Assign clear accountability trails for individual controls to teams and stakeholders. This gives them greater ownership and ensures they perform their roles more efficiently.
- Integrate cross-mapping into audit preparation: Leverage cross-mapping when preparing data for audits. Being able to review information for multiple frameworks at once reduces the preparation time and makes audits smoother.
- Leverage a scalable automation solution: As your organization grows, your compliance and regulatory requirements change. Implement an automation solution that can easily scale with your compliance needs.
How Vanta can help you achieve multi-framework compliance
Vanta is a trust and compliance management platform that makes your compliance process more efficient and saves you significant time and resources.
By leveraging the automation features and resources, you can reduce the time spent on each framework and related audits by significant margins, up to 82% according to Vanta customer benchmarks.
The platform offers dedicated products for 35+ popular frameworks, including HIPAA, CMMC, ISO 42001, ISO 27001, and GDPR. If you’re pursuing compliance with multiple frameworks simultaneously, Vanta’s built-in cross-mapping across frameworks can minimize unnecessary effort by providing pre-mapped evidence across multiple framework requirements. Additionally, you can use Vanta AI to help suggest evidence cross-mapping for controls you may want to bring into Vanta.
With Vanta, you get access to multiple helpful features that streamline your compliance efforts and help you scale more efficiently, including:
- 375+ integrations with popular software (cloud providers, CRM systems, etc.)
- 1,200+ automated, hourly tests
- Automated gap assessments
- Continuous compliance monitoring
- Automated evidence collection
See firsthand how Vanta can streamline multi-framework compliance by scheduling a custom demo.
{{cta_simple29="/cta-blocks"}} | GRC product page
| Role: | GRC responsibilities: |
|---|---|
| Board of directors | Central to the overarching GRC strategy, this group sets the direction for the compliance strategy. They determine which standards and regulations are necessary for compliance and align the GRC strategy with business objectives. |
| Chief financial officer | Primary responsibility for the success of the GRC program and for reporting results to the board. |
| Operations managers from relevant departments | This group owns processes. They are responsible for the success and direction of risk management and compliance within their departments. |
| Representatives from relevant departments | These are the activity owners. These team members are responsible for carrying out specific compliance and risk management tasks within their departments and for integrating these tasks into their workflows. |
| Contract managers from relevant department | These team members are responsible for managing interactions with vendors and other third parties in their department to ensure all risk management and compliance measures are being taken. |
| Chief information security officer (CISO) | Defines the organization’s information security policy, designs risk and vulnerability assessments, and develops information security policies. |
| Data protection officer (DPO) or legal counsel | Develops goals for data privacy based on legal regulations and other compliance needs, designs and implements privacy policies and practices, and assesses these practices for effectiveness. |
| GRC lead | Responsible for overseeing the execution of the GRC program in collaboration with the executive team as well as maintaining the organization’s library of security controls. |
| Cybersecurity analyst(s) | Implements and monitors cybersecurity measures that are in line with the GRC program and business objectives. |
| Compliance analyst(s) | Monitors the organization’s compliance with all regulations and standards necessary, identifies any compliance gaps, and works to mitigate them. |
| Risk analyst(s) | Carries out the risk management program for the organization and serves as a resource for risk management across various departments, including identifying, mitigating, and monitoring risks. |
| IT security specialist(s) | Implements security controls within the IT system in coordination with the cybersecurity analyst(s). |
Explore more GRC articles
Introduction to GRC
Implementing a GRC program
Optimizing a GRC program
Governance
Risk
Compliance
Continuous control monitoring
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