Assessing your company’s information security (InfoSec) and compliance completeness is a daunting challenge. Most compliance manuals are hundreds of pages long and the number of policies is also a big number. CISOs and Compliance officers can spend a significant amount of time trying to apply the compliance regulations to their security framework. It’s impossible to remember the list of policies, let alone how to address all the security controls per the compliance requirements.

When CISOs and Compliance officers try to map the policies to the security controls, this process is very manual and prone to human error. It can take years to meet compliance requirements with this slow and laborious process.

There is another challenge CISOs face in implementing the policy mappings to each security controls. The reason for this challenge is the language barrier between the InfoSec department and the IT team. This barrier exists due to the lack of security expertise within the IT community and can cause security gaps and vulnerabilities.

Companies who are serious about their compliance should use an automated and detailed assessment platform, which will gather information from various departments, to fully understand the state of their InfoSec infrastructure with respect to compliance standards and business needs. This understanding is critical and necessary to see the vulnerabilities and gaps, and to then design and implement the needed remediation efforts to be fully compliant. Finally, the platform should be able to provide a complete 360-degree view of your security posture, validate the implementation of the security controls, and provide a detailed risk report.

I hope these experiences and best practices help you avoid unwanted access to your company’s information. Stay tuned for more, = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =