What is compliance management?
Compliance management in many organisations starts with understanding the regulatory obligations you have and any standards you want to adhere to that apply to your business. The level of regulations and standards that your organisation face can vastly change from industry to industry and country. For example, PCI DSS focuses on businesses in the retail sector, and GDPR needs to be considered by organisations operating or doing business within the European Union.
What is needed to progress an organisation’s compliance program?
Once businesses have identified the regulations and standards they need to adhere to, they will often;
- Review and document regulatory obligations.
- Define or use the specific controls from the regulations.
- Look to align and simplify regulations and standards, into business or regulatory requirements, then define controls.
- Organisations should rationalise their control library to ensure controls meet multiple regulatory obligations. The compliance team can then test one control and demonstrate compliance against numerous regulatory obligations.
- Leverage inhouse, bought (UCF) or free knowledge (SCF), that help to combine regulations and standards into single regulatory controls.
After the regulatory controls have been defined, the organisation audit or compliance function; depending on their size will test the controls, undertake compliance monitory and provide on-going advice to the business.
Interested in learning more about SCF and metaframeworks? Then check out our latest webinar with the SCF Founder here.
Who is responsible for running the compliance program?
Compliance management is usually owned and operated by what is referred to as the ‘Second Line of Defence’
There are various strategies to address compliance. Often organisations rely on the lines of defence model as seen above. This strategy gives the board and senior management three clear line functions to rely on, ensuring its compliance program is reviewed, tested and challenged independently by the second and then the third line of defence.
What are the main challenges businesses face when running a compliance program without a comprehensive compliance management solution?
- 50% + of organisations globally manage risk and compliance and the relevant processes use MS Office. This could be in the form of emails, PowerPoint, Excel, Word and SharePoint. As a result, this leads to a disjointed, confused, disorganised and complicated organisational view.
- Compliance leaders spend far too much time manually reconciling regulatory information from many different locations, without a consistent format for the data to understand compliance and often are looking at out of date data.
- Huge amounts of duplicated effort when managing controls. As most organisations don’t have central repositories for the regulations and controls, they often have hundreds of duplicated controls and testing, and most are not aware of how much duplicated effort they are performing.
- Bringing together multiple sources of regulatory data manually, then producing compliance report packs for the board and regulators. This often takes weeks and can be one or more FTE’s.
- Lack of workflow and structure with clear accountability. This results in inconsistent quality and assessments.
- Storing documentation (evidence and assessments etc) via email with no security and once again no workflow and accountability.
- Manual reproduction of the information for the use of external auditors, regulators and board review.
Why consider SureCloud’s Compliance Management solution to help solve these challenges?
- The solution is pre-configured, using SureCloud’s domain insight and extensive client feedback from other engagements.
- Minimum implementation efforts, in most cases only 10%-30% change from standard product required.
- Limited configuration changes to accommodate customer’s processes and control terminology.
- The solution is deployed within an accelerated period of time and at a reduced cost.
- Defined and proven project delivery model.
