What Does It Mean To Be Compliant?
Regardless of the scope or industry of your business, compliance is a concept you must take seriously. It dictates how you make policy decisions and guides your day-to-day procedures.
Buffalo and Western New York, like the rest of the world, have witnessed tremendous growth in business activities. This means heightened competition as every enterprise struggles to survive. It's, therefore, necessary for the government and other regulatory agencies to establish guidelines for fair play and healthy competition. These regulations and standards vary from one industry to the other.
We have PCI DSS for the payment card industry, HIPAA for those offering health services, SOX for public companies, FINRA for the financial sector, and so on. To be compliant, you must have well-thought-out plans for abiding by these regulations and best practice standards.
Today, Buffalo Computer Help focuses on one of the most frequently asked questions — what is compliance in IT and business? Here's a brief video to get you started:
Why Is Compliance Important to Your Organization?
Being compliant has several benefits for your business and its users. Here are four reasons why you can't afford to take compliance lightly:
- Noncompliance Is Very Costly: Compliance enforcement bodies have lately been very aggressive with defaulters, going by the many recent landmark non-compliance fines. It's an experience you would not want to have — protracted lawsuits crowned by hefty penalties. Nobody budgets for noncompliance fines, so this definitely would be a financial setback. In extreme cases, it can force you to shut down.
- Compliance Improves Your Cybersecurity: Most IT compliance regulations are just your standard security protocols designed to fit specific scenarios. For instance, almost all the twelve PCI DSS requirements speak to the developing and sustaining a secure network. When you make efforts to stay compliant, you are, by extension, working towards safeguarding your systems.
- You Will Be More Productive: The truth is that regulations are meant to protect your business and its customers and not to frustrate you, as is widely thought. Security standards safeguard your systems and user credentials and health, and safety protocols secure your users' wellbeing. When you comply with these and all the other regulatory requirements, you limit cases of disruption in your production processes. The less the stoppages due to injuries or data breaches, the higher the productivity.
- Better Public Relations: Nobody wants to work with an organization that jeopardizes the security of their credentials. The easiest way to market your business is by demonstrating that you can protect the integrity and privacy of your customer's information.
As you can see, being compliant is not just about trying to avoid non-compliance enforcement actions. In fact, your business is the biggest beneficiary.
How Can You Ensure Your Organization Stays Compliant? Identify applicable compliance requirements, design the requisite frameworks, and implement them for every policy and procedure. Simple, right? If so, then why are so many businesses still failing compliance audits?
Compliance is a process, not an event, and this is where most organizations get it wrong. They tend to wait until it's too late or until they are due for audits. This 'not big enough' mentality has caused many companies to pay very high fines. From our experience, we know that it's imperative to begin planning as early as possible to achieve full compliance. That's what makes the difference. A last-minute rush will not give you the best results.
One more thing — experience beats everything when it comes to compliance. That's because this is a vast and complex concept. You should work with a reliable IT company that's vastly experienced in handling compliance issues within your specific industry.
Is It Possible to Manage Compliance Internally?
Yes — but it's far more expensive and less effective than outsourcing compliance as a service. Buffalo Computer Help is the go-to provider of compliance and other IT services in Buffalo and Western New York.
Call us today at (716) 206-3200 or send an email to info@buffalocomputerhelp.com, and let's talk about your compliance needs.