How to Cut Down Cost and Time of Compliance Assessments

How to Cut Down Cost and Time of Compliance Assessments

How to Cut Down Cost and Time of Compliance Assessments

Compliance is an aspect of security risk management that no organization should ever ignore. It has the power to free your organization of all security risks, provided your security policies are designed the right way. A key step to ensure compliance in any organization is to conduct regular compliance assessments. However, compliance assessments can be time-consuming and expensive if not performed in an optimal manner.

Here are some tips on how to cut down the cost and time of compliance assessments:

Identify vulnerabilities

If you know the areas or departments in your organization where data is more vulnerable to cyber-threats, these areas must be addressed first. You can prioritize the compliance areas based on the extent of vulnerabilities. Restricting your focus on a few critical areas, especially at the beginning of your business operations, can save you a lot of time and money.

Automate your compliance assessments

Thanks to the continuous reforms in IT, you can now let a single software perform compliance assessments and suggest remediation measures for your organization. On a single platform, the software can keep an eye on user activity, identify user actions that do not meet your standards and regulations and suggest immediate action to minimize damage. Therefore, automation helps you save the cost and time invested in compliance assessments.

Address compliance issues in real-time

If you are quick at identifying and remediating compliance failures in your organization, the time and money invested in subsequent compliance assessments would be much lower. It is thus prudent to assess compliance in real-time across different departments and integrate assessments with remediation. When instances of non-compliance with your security policy are rectified immediately, similar issues can be avoided in the future at no extra cost of other resources.

Divide and rule

If your organization performs compliance assessments manually, it will be a good idea to divide different compliance assessment-related tasks among your employees. The employees could be a part of your InfoSec team. Their expertise will make the process smooth, less tedious, and also save money in the future. You can then cut down the frequency of assessments without compromising quality. This will further help you save the time and the money spent on compliance assessments.

Cultivate a culture of honesty and transparency

This is a more gradual process but has the potential to save you immensely in terms of both cost and time in the future. If your employees are honest about the compliance mistakes they are making knowingly or unknowingly, they will be more careful when a similar event transpires in the future. One way to promote honesty and transparency is to make your employees aware of just how important compliance is for business continuity, customer trust, and legalities. With this realization, your employees would automatically be carrying out their own individual compliance assessments. Thus, honesty and transparency in your organization can make your compliance assessments cheaper, quicker, and more efficient.

Conclusion

Follow the tips we have described above and made your organization’s compliance assessments more streamlined, cost-effective, and timely.