Why It Matters
Grasping The Evolving Scope Of Compliance
The public announcements of discovered breaches within organizations have become more prevalent each year. With it, the cost of remediation due to exposure has also increased. Regulators have countered by imposing even more stringent frameworks on organizations.
Compliance frameworks, in turn, can become a maze filled with potential obstacles, dead ends, and hurdles to overcome. Depending on the organization’s vertical, that maze can take the form of frameworks such as HIPAA, Hi-Trust for healthcare, PCI, SOC2 for the financial sector, or geographical regulations such as GDPR and FedRAMP.
Organizations are quickly expanding into a full or hybrid workforce and utilizing PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) providers such as AWS and Azure, or SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) applications like O365 and Salesforce. On-Prem, Cloud, and Hybrid environments call for additional reworking of compliance frameworks. As frameworks are rewritten to fit the needs of the current landscape, the need for a cybersecurity partner becomes an absolute necessity.
In addition, CMMC is changing the way defense contractors handle data security. It’s an effort to make sure organizations handling Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) meet the Department of Defense’s (DoD) cybersecurity maturity expectations
CMMC Level 2 is estimated to impact 80,000 organizations in the DIB, though this number is believed to be significantly underestimated. For defense contractors and those supporting them, here’s the deal: Knowing and understanding CMMC is table stakes for keeping the DoD contracts that keep the doors open.
The Risks Of Compliance Negligence
35%
$5.05M
$220K
58%
Your Cybersecurity Roadmap
Assessing risks in compliance deals with analyzing and prioritizing potential exposure points across your organization. Both internal and external risks require consideration and strategies to manage. Frequently factors such as decentralized logs, data handling practices, lack of employee digital awareness, and emerging threats are high-risk areas.
Learn More about Compliance
This is one of the most common questions, especially for organizations new to compliance frameworks. Commonly, researching government and industry websites is a good starting point. Legal experts can also provide insight into current or upcoming regulations that could impact the organization. Lastly, establishing a solid cybersecurity partner can prepare you to meet requirements and stay in the know.
Breaches found to be caused by non-compliance typically suffer the following consequences:
- Legal Consequences - Non-compliance requires regulators to impose sanctions for all violations found during any investigation.
- Damage to Reputation - An organization can receive irreparable harm to its brand and public standing with long-term repercussions to revenue and increased customer churn.
- Organizational Downtime - A breach can quickly cause downtime to an organization, leading to loss of productivity, revenue, and disruption to goods and services.
As more organizations expand their digital footprint into the cloud and add remote workers, the potential for exposure increases. Threat actors have moved to targets of opportunity with exposed vulnerabilities in applications, misconfigurations, and operating systems. Cloud migrations expose organizations to the shared responsibility model, which requires end users to secure and protect servers, cloud storage such as S3 and Blob, and code developed in the cloud.
Cyber insurance typically will not cover breaches found out of compliance. While insurance is designed to provide coverage for forensic investigations, legal fees, and notifications, none of these are protected without proper compliance adherence. Further, insurance companies will mandate that an organization maintain compliance across all the framework’s regulations as a condition for coverage.
Compliance doesn’t have to keep you up at night. While regulations will continue to evolve, establishing a solid cybersecurity partnership can help you sleep better. Finding the right tools and services that meet your compliance needs is more important than ever.
Protect What Matters
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