With the increased prevalence and severity of cyberattacks and other security concerns, the need for solid cyber resilience and hands-on risk management keeps growing. To protect your organization and its critical data, you should develop and execute a robust security compliance strategy.
Doing so requires a thorough understanding of security and compliance frameworks, standards, and effective tools. However, aligning with authoritative compliance sources (like ISO 27001, NIST, or HIPAA) that best match your risk profile can be challenging.
These standards are often complex and nuanced, with documentation that spans hundreds of pages, which can become overwhelming. Furthermore, interpretative rules and conflicting opinions across your team or vendors can make it difficult to get started.
This guide will serve as an actionable tool for staying updated on the best practices and effective solutions surrounding security compliance. We’ll cover:
- Key requirements and components of an effective security compliance strategy
- Examples of security compliance standards and regulations
- Best practices for database security and compliance
What is security compliance?
Security compliance is the ongoing practice of implementing standards and regulations designed to improve your organization’s security posture. It also involves continuous monitoring and improvement of the implemented controls to align your security posture with the emerging threat landscape.
Besides safeguarding critical assets, security compliance helps you meet industry regulations, ensuring smooth operations without regulatory setbacks. Other notable benefits include:
- Effective risk mitigation: Proactive risk management is a key component of security compliance, so implementing a robust strategy enables effective risk detection and timely treatment plans.
- Data protection: Security compliance ensures data protection beyond information stored on the cloud. The right strategy addresses everything from physical security to third-party risks, including improving cyber resilience throughout your entire supply chain.
- Maintained operational continuity: Besides preventing regulatory disruptions, security compliance minimizes the risk of data breaches and similar security threats that could considerably impact operational continuity.
- Accelerated growth through customer trust: Implementing industry-accepted security frameworks communicates trust and commitment to responsible operations, improving your reputation and overall standing with customers and other stakeholders, allowing you to unlock the deals where security and trust are higher priorities.
Security compliance isn’t optional if you want to scale sustainably or withstand regulatory scrutiny. By contrast, failing to ensure security compliance can trigger unfavorable events that impact profitability. Here’s a common scenario that might unfold:
- The organization’s reputation and brand image suffer due to a posture that is perceived as weak by the public and customers
- This weak reputation attracts bad press and increased regulatory scrutiny
- The increased scrutiny from customers or regulators results in more frequent audits, increasing workload, stress, and audit fatigue for IT and compliance teams
- The increased stress can decline employee morale, which further reduces productivity or improvements to operational efficiency
{{cta_withimage22="/cta-blocks"}} | The Audit ready checklist
What are the standard cybersecurity compliance requirements?
A typical security compliance strategy requires you to set up the following:
- Security and governance policies: Well-defined policies align team members in all levels of an organization’s hierarchy as it brings a shared understanding of their roles and responsibilities for security
- Security risk management: Many security standards require robust risk assessments, ongoing security compliance analyses, and effective risk mitigation strategies that address all the scoped vulnerabilities
- Control implementation workflows: Ideally, your organization can optimize its cybersecurity program to implement the necessary security controls without inefficiencies and close any compliance gaps swiftly
- Regular security audits: Besides being mandatory for maintaining a good standing with specific regulations, regular security compliance audits help you stay on top of your security posture and proactively handle threats and vulnerabilities
Organizations can have different control requirements based on their industry or specific security concerns. For example, U.S. healthcare organizations must adhere to data security compliance frameworks like HIPAA, while any organization processing or storing the data of California residents must comply with the CCPA.
This is only a starting point for security regulations—your organization will likely need to comply with additional ones to ensure comprehensive protection.
Top 8 security compliance examples
Among the many security frameworks, we’ve highlighted eight that organizations implement most frequently. The table below outlines them along with key information:
Besides regulatory obligations, there are no universal rules as to which frameworks you should adopt—you should tailor your security compliance program to your organization’s needs and industry expectations
.
Implementing a security and compliance program: 5 challenges
A comprehensive information security compliance program can take extensive time to develop and execute. Here are the most common obstacles you may encounter along the way:
- Overlapping yet distinct frameworks and standards: Many standards and regulations share common controls while still working as standalone authoritative sources, which can lead to duplicative work if you don’t map the overlapping controls effectively. It’s a good practice to cross-map compliance requirements and identify overlapping controls to reduce duplicative efforts when adhering to multiple frameworks.
- Heavy administrative burden: Security compliance requires collaboration and input from various teams across all areas of the business (not just security and IT), which may become overwhelmed with compliance work on top of their everyday duties. This makes it challenging to maintain operational efficiency while pursuing compliance in regulation-heavy industries.
- Resource constraints: Startups and SMBs might not have the budget, internal or external expertise, or bandwidth necessary to ensure full compliance with all the applicable standards and regulations.
- Third-party risk management: Organizations that partner with vendors and other third parties inherit their risk. The more your supply chain grows, the more challenging it might be to manage third-party risk.
- Evolving customer needs: Your customers operate within their own compliance landscapes based on the industries they are in, and so their needs will evolve naturally over time. As a third-party service provider, understanding upcoming and relevant changes becomes challenging as proactive approaches require upfront time and resources.
Besides these issues, a common concern organizations face relates to demonstrating their security and compliance posture. Collecting evidence, maintaining documentation, and working with auditors can be resource-intensive and time-consuming, especially if done without a systemized program. You can avoid these issues by implementing the right processes and tools.
{{cta_withimage3="/cta-blocks"}} | The ultimate guide to scaling compliance
Best practices for security and compliance management
Here are several proven practices that could help you develop a security compliance management system as effortlessly as possible:
- Establish a strong security culture: Security isn’t only a concern of your IT team—employees at all levels should understand what they own and complete their daily activities with it in mind, so establish systems and processes that make this happen. Integrating security compliance into daily operations rather than treating it as a one-time effort reduces the likelihood of overlooked vulnerabilities and compliance gaps.
- Implement automation and streamlined workflows: You should develop a comprehensive integration infrastructure that aligns the programs, tools, and workflows used by your cross-functional partners. Automate as many tasks as possible to prevent your team from becoming overwhelmed with repetitive work.
- Centralize security efforts with a unified platform: Disparate security and compliance management systems leave too much room for error and inefficiencies. That’s why you should leverage a centralized platform that creates a single source of truth for internal and external stakeholders.
A particularly important trend you should follow is the presence of AI in security compliance tools. AI-enabled tools drastically reduce the time and manual work needed to complete compliance tasks through advanced, easy-to-configure automation and comprehensive analyses of large document sets.
By combining AI with clear, streamlined workflows, you can achieve and maintain continuous security compliance without extensive resources.
Enable smooth security compliance and risk management with Vanta
Vanta is an AI-powered compliance and trust management platform that automates up to 90% of work associated with over 35 security standards and regulations.
The platform offers a robust automated compliance product, which comes with useful features like:
- Automated evidence collection supported by over 375 integrations
- Centralized control documentation
- Real-time control monitoring through 1,200+ automated, hourly tests
- Dozens of pre-built and custom controls and policy templates
- Out-of-the-box security and privacy training videos
For further automation, you can leverage Vanta AI to set up time-consuming tasks with simple configurations. You can automate vendor risk reviews and security questionnaires and even save time by mapping and maintaining existing controls.
Schedule a custom demo of Vanta’s automated compliance product to learn more about its features and experience them first-hand.
{{cta_simple29="/cta-blocks"}} | Automated compliance product page
Compliance
What is security compliance? Challenges and best practices
Looking to upgrade to continuous, automated GRC and get visibility across your entire program?
With the increased prevalence and severity of cyberattacks and other security concerns, the need for solid cyber resilience and hands-on risk management keeps growing. To protect your organization and its critical data, you should develop and execute a robust security compliance strategy.
Doing so requires a thorough understanding of security and compliance frameworks, standards, and effective tools. However, aligning with authoritative compliance sources (like ISO 27001, NIST, or HIPAA) that best match your risk profile can be challenging.
These standards are often complex and nuanced, with documentation that spans hundreds of pages, which can become overwhelming. Furthermore, interpretative rules and conflicting opinions across your team or vendors can make it difficult to get started.
This guide will serve as an actionable tool for staying updated on the best practices and effective solutions surrounding security compliance. We’ll cover:
- Key requirements and components of an effective security compliance strategy
- Examples of security compliance standards and regulations
- Best practices for database security and compliance
What is security compliance?
Security compliance is the ongoing practice of implementing standards and regulations designed to improve your organization’s security posture. It also involves continuous monitoring and improvement of the implemented controls to align your security posture with the emerging threat landscape.
Besides safeguarding critical assets, security compliance helps you meet industry regulations, ensuring smooth operations without regulatory setbacks. Other notable benefits include:
- Effective risk mitigation: Proactive risk management is a key component of security compliance, so implementing a robust strategy enables effective risk detection and timely treatment plans.
- Data protection: Security compliance ensures data protection beyond information stored on the cloud. The right strategy addresses everything from physical security to third-party risks, including improving cyber resilience throughout your entire supply chain.
- Maintained operational continuity: Besides preventing regulatory disruptions, security compliance minimizes the risk of data breaches and similar security threats that could considerably impact operational continuity.
- Accelerated growth through customer trust: Implementing industry-accepted security frameworks communicates trust and commitment to responsible operations, improving your reputation and overall standing with customers and other stakeholders, allowing you to unlock the deals where security and trust are higher priorities.
Security compliance isn’t optional if you want to scale sustainably or withstand regulatory scrutiny. By contrast, failing to ensure security compliance can trigger unfavorable events that impact profitability. Here’s a common scenario that might unfold:
- The organization’s reputation and brand image suffer due to a posture that is perceived as weak by the public and customers
- This weak reputation attracts bad press and increased regulatory scrutiny
- The increased scrutiny from customers or regulators results in more frequent audits, increasing workload, stress, and audit fatigue for IT and compliance teams
- The increased stress can decline employee morale, which further reduces productivity or improvements to operational efficiency
{{cta_withimage22="/cta-blocks"}} | The Audit ready checklist
What are the standard cybersecurity compliance requirements?
A typical security compliance strategy requires you to set up the following:
- Security and governance policies: Well-defined policies align team members in all levels of an organization’s hierarchy as it brings a shared understanding of their roles and responsibilities for security
- Security risk management: Many security standards require robust risk assessments, ongoing security compliance analyses, and effective risk mitigation strategies that address all the scoped vulnerabilities
- Control implementation workflows: Ideally, your organization can optimize its cybersecurity program to implement the necessary security controls without inefficiencies and close any compliance gaps swiftly
- Regular security audits: Besides being mandatory for maintaining a good standing with specific regulations, regular security compliance audits help you stay on top of your security posture and proactively handle threats and vulnerabilities
Organizations can have different control requirements based on their industry or specific security concerns. For example, U.S. healthcare organizations must adhere to data security compliance frameworks like HIPAA, while any organization processing or storing the data of California residents must comply with the CCPA.
This is only a starting point for security regulations—your organization will likely need to comply with additional ones to ensure comprehensive protection.
Top 8 security compliance examples
Among the many security frameworks, we’ve highlighted eight that organizations implement most frequently. The table below outlines them along with key information:
Besides regulatory obligations, there are no universal rules as to which frameworks you should adopt—you should tailor your security compliance program to your organization’s needs and industry expectations
.
Implementing a security and compliance program: 5 challenges
A comprehensive information security compliance program can take extensive time to develop and execute. Here are the most common obstacles you may encounter along the way:
- Overlapping yet distinct frameworks and standards: Many standards and regulations share common controls while still working as standalone authoritative sources, which can lead to duplicative work if you don’t map the overlapping controls effectively. It’s a good practice to cross-map compliance requirements and identify overlapping controls to reduce duplicative efforts when adhering to multiple frameworks.
- Heavy administrative burden: Security compliance requires collaboration and input from various teams across all areas of the business (not just security and IT), which may become overwhelmed with compliance work on top of their everyday duties. This makes it challenging to maintain operational efficiency while pursuing compliance in regulation-heavy industries.
- Resource constraints: Startups and SMBs might not have the budget, internal or external expertise, or bandwidth necessary to ensure full compliance with all the applicable standards and regulations.
- Third-party risk management: Organizations that partner with vendors and other third parties inherit their risk. The more your supply chain grows, the more challenging it might be to manage third-party risk.
- Evolving customer needs: Your customers operate within their own compliance landscapes based on the industries they are in, and so their needs will evolve naturally over time. As a third-party service provider, understanding upcoming and relevant changes becomes challenging as proactive approaches require upfront time and resources.
Besides these issues, a common concern organizations face relates to demonstrating their security and compliance posture. Collecting evidence, maintaining documentation, and working with auditors can be resource-intensive and time-consuming, especially if done without a systemized program. You can avoid these issues by implementing the right processes and tools.
{{cta_withimage3="/cta-blocks"}} | The ultimate guide to scaling compliance
Best practices for security and compliance management
Here are several proven practices that could help you develop a security compliance management system as effortlessly as possible:
- Establish a strong security culture: Security isn’t only a concern of your IT team—employees at all levels should understand what they own and complete their daily activities with it in mind, so establish systems and processes that make this happen. Integrating security compliance into daily operations rather than treating it as a one-time effort reduces the likelihood of overlooked vulnerabilities and compliance gaps.
- Implement automation and streamlined workflows: You should develop a comprehensive integration infrastructure that aligns the programs, tools, and workflows used by your cross-functional partners. Automate as many tasks as possible to prevent your team from becoming overwhelmed with repetitive work.
- Centralize security efforts with a unified platform: Disparate security and compliance management systems leave too much room for error and inefficiencies. That’s why you should leverage a centralized platform that creates a single source of truth for internal and external stakeholders.
A particularly important trend you should follow is the presence of AI in security compliance tools. AI-enabled tools drastically reduce the time and manual work needed to complete compliance tasks through advanced, easy-to-configure automation and comprehensive analyses of large document sets.
By combining AI with clear, streamlined workflows, you can achieve and maintain continuous security compliance without extensive resources.
Enable smooth security compliance and risk management with Vanta
Vanta is an AI-powered compliance and trust management platform that automates up to 90% of work associated with over 35 security standards and regulations.
The platform offers a robust automated compliance product, which comes with useful features like:
- Automated evidence collection supported by over 375 integrations
- Centralized control documentation
- Real-time control monitoring through 1,200+ automated, hourly tests
- Dozens of pre-built and custom controls and policy templates
- Out-of-the-box security and privacy training videos
For further automation, you can leverage Vanta AI to set up time-consuming tasks with simple configurations. You can automate vendor risk reviews and security questionnaires and even save time by mapping and maintaining existing controls.
Schedule a custom demo of Vanta’s automated compliance product to learn more about its features and experience them first-hand.
{{cta_simple29="/cta-blocks"}} | Automated compliance 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
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