GDPR. HIPAA. PCI DSS. HITECH. ISO. SOC2. FedRAMP. SOX. PIPEDA. NFPA. ANSI. TIA. These are just some of the guidelines, laws, and regulations businesses must comply with in today’s digital world. Some apply to everyone, while others are specific to certain industries, businesses, or governments.
Various global regulations require businesses to have processes and tools to secure sensitive information. These might include security controls like multi-factor authentication (MFA), a robust quality management system (QMS) to centralize policies, and creating a corporate culture focused on preventing non-compliant behavior.
The right solution for your business often involves cross-functional collaboration and managing the interplay of people, processes, and technology. Smart leaders understand this combination and ensure their business follows applicable guidelines.
For example, you may use tech solutions to monitor, manage, and automate manual tasks while people and processes handle the rest to comply. However, it can be challenging to keep up with the pace of technology or even your business's growth.
Investing in compliance initiatives can significantly impact a company’s bottom line. Failure to comply has been shown to increase costs by 2.71 times. Add in the savings on any technology already in your tech stack, and you can reduce costs even more.
How is your business or organization looking? Are you already using products that could help you scale your processes and future-proof your business with simple compliance for today and tomorrow? Let’s explore the world of compliance, technology, and processes.
Regulations, standards, and technology change often
Picture this: A few decades ago, we would enter a location into MapQuest and get turn-by-turn directions to print and bring with us. This was enough back then, but now it’s ancient technology. Today, we use GPS apps with voice instructions, can see where traffic backups are due to construction or accidents, and get rerouted in real time to the safest and most efficient route.
The same should apply to a compliance strategy in today’s fast-changing digital world. Does your strategy consider all the “routes” to achieving or maintaining compliance? Are all documents being updated regularly and easily accessible? Can everything be managed across a business that grows and changes like a living organism?
This evolving and dynamic environment is what CISOs, CSOs, CROs (chief risk officers), and general counsels contend with today. They have to consider everything to ensure their business aligns with any compliance rules and regulations that apply to them. That’s a big challenge.
Platforms like Confluence can be used to build quality management systems (QMSs) to manage data, systems, policies, and processes while serving as a single source of truth. According to Okta, businesses today use 175 applications to operate, a number that grows yearly. They already have software licenses, so why not use them for compliance initiatives?
But in terms of compliance, do these solutions and apps work as comprehensively as you need them to? Are they scalable for a growing business or rapidly changing guidelines? To continue the navigation analogy, does the solution you’re using only provide one predetermined route, or is it adaptable and capable of rapid updates?
Juggling multiple compliance rules and regulations
Companies today often need to comply with local, federal, global, or industry-wide regulations, often simultaneously. For example, financial organizations must comply with SOX and PCI DSS; healthcare companies must adhere to HIPAA and PIPEDA; and those who deal with European citizens must follow GDPR.
While the specifics vary, many compliance regulations share these common themes:
- Protecting sensitive information
- Ensuring accurate and transparent reporting
- Safeguarding individual rights
- Maintaining fair business practices
- Protecting the environment and public health
Centralizing your documents is the first step in managing your compliance obligations effectively. Gather all stakeholders responsible for compliance to determine what's available, what's missing, and how it needs to be stored. Cross-collaboration is key, as you want to encourage everyone to share and participate fully in the process.
Next, you can automate this with a software platform like Confluence and Appfire apps. These tools can hold all your documents, make it easy to update them, and send notifications whenever something changes.
This means casting a wide net across the organization to find all the teams and stakeholders who know the standards and have documents for them. This approach simplifies the management and maintenance of compliance information, helping your company manage compliance risks at the intersection of technology, processes, data, and people.
Challenges to adopting new regulations at your company
Companies looking to streamline their compliance processes or enter a new industry with added regulations can greatly benefit from a more integrated and collaborative approach. People may be used to doing things the “old way” and may not understand why they need to track their work or save documents in a single document management platform.
They might be comfortable sending multiple follow-up emails and working in silos, but this can lead to missed SLAs or sharing unapproved document versions with important customers. Such practices can violate compliance rules and risk severe legal and financial consequences.
Additionally, there are risks associated with mobile data access, detailed access controls required by some laws, and the subtleties of file usage tracking mandated by certain standards. It’s no wonder business leaders stay up at night worrying about these issues, especially when organizations lose an average of $4 million in revenue due to a single non-compliance event.
Business leaders anticipating these challenges may wonder how to start the compliance process for a new regulation while also optimizing across regulatory frameworks. Working with consultants or trusted partners can help identify gaps and streamline processes. For example, you could roll out a platform like Confluence and extend its functionalities with Appfire's Knowledge Management solution to consolidate your documentation and provide a single source of truth customized to the company's needs.
Your IT team can support you in understanding the technology your organization uses now and what existing features meet these needs. Legal will know which regulations and laws apply to your business and what requirements you need to meet. Marketing might use a CRM or knowledge management system to store documents and quickly produce version update reports. Collaboration across these teams and with third-party partners can help you design the right mix of tech and processes to ensure compliance.
Scaling compliance in an overly digital world
Senior business leaders often want to ensure compliance with rules, laws, and regulations “fast and cheap,” but compliance is usually neither of those things. It’s also typically more complicated to roll out and maintain, but it can be made more efficient and cost effective.
You can set up your business and organization for compliance success with the right approach, tools, and teamwork. You’ll align with current rules and also future-proof your business, leveraging ever-evolving tech to expand into new markets and industries with minimal fuss. You’ll update documents, set up and roll out new training modules, and develop processes that harness your tech stack efficiently, ensuring everyone is ready and compliant.
Your organization will scale up as fast as you need, so your business stays within the regulations and meets all the rules and requirements. The combination of Confluence and Appfire apps makes it easy to update multiple pages at once whenever regulations change. Reduce the time it takes to update them while ensuring you’re maintaining compliance everywhere.
You want to be able to prove compliance with efficient reporting that aligns with your guidelines, satisfying regulators and legal teams. Make it easy for employees to learn about and stay updated on compliance processes through automated notifications of new training and reminders about regulations as they work. Your tech stack can be modified and updated to suit the needs of your workflows and regulatory requirements, ensuring everyone is happy.
Your tech stack may already hold the compliance solutions
Tech scalability is just one important aspect of a modern business; process scalability is another. The ideal state for compliance is a combination of tech and process scalability. Getting there may seem like a big challenge, but many organizations are already on their way — they just don’t know it.
By understanding the requirements, collaborating across teams, and leveraging technology, you can create a modern, efficient, and scalable compliance approach on a platform you already know and love. Employees will appreciate the simplicity, customers will trust that you’re protecting their data, and your stakeholders will be confident that you are compliant.
Compliance isn’t just about avoiding fines or ticking boxes on a requirements list. It’s about building a business and organization that respects and protects information and its stakeholders, operates ethically, and is prepared for the challenges of a digital world. That’s not just good ethics; it’s good business.
Appfire can help you overcome compliance challenges. Our Knowledge Management experts can help you choose the right combination of apps and processes for your business. We’ll help you build an enterprise quality management system that works with what you have and identifies potential problems.