Effective corporate compliance is an increasingly urgent issue for businesses. More regulations continue to proliferate across the landscape, and compliance obligations are becoming more complex.
The need for an effective compliance management tool to help CISOs and senior management meet those ever-expanding compliance requirements has never been greater. A manual approach to tracking and monitoring compliance activities drives up costs and is more prone to error. Innovative businesses need a compliance management tool to get the job done.
These tools vary in their approach and are the key to building a robust compliance structure while streamlining workflows and risk management tasks.
What Is Compliance Management?
Compliance management ensures that employees and activities across the organization align with laws and regulations. These requirements are set by various entities, including governments, regulatory and industry bodies, and employee unions.
Non-compliance often leads to significant fines and business disruptions. Documented procedures and policies are combined with audits to ensure compliance and reduce vulnerabilities.
However, compliance management is much more than just a check-the-box exercise. Organizations may seem compliant on paper but an incident can reveal weak business processes and controls.
What Is the Importance of a Compliance Management System?
“The cost of non-compliance is great. If you think compliance is expensive, try non-compliance.”
– Former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty
The importance of regulatory compliance cannot be overstated. It reduces overall organizational risk, defines employee expectations, and protects your reputation. In addition, there are real financial benefits by avoiding regulatory penalties and ensuring business continuity.
Do I Need a Compliance Management Tool?
When we picture companies needing compliance management systems, we usually point to large corporations, financial institutions, and multinationals with many risks and much to lose.
The underlying need for compliance management software is the wide variety of regulations these companies must adhere to as well as the difficulty of manual compliance oversight via spreadsheets.
Additionally, compliance obligations are no longer limited to the banking industry or multinational companies. Current regulations force all companies operating in specific sectors to invest in compliance and risk management. For example, even small retailers must meet PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards) to protect consumers’ credit card data.
As companies implement better handling and monitoring of their business processes, compliance management tools enable them to scale their activities without increasing their risk of non-compliance.
What Are the Different Types of Compliance Management Tools?
Not all compliance management software is based upon the same principles and frameworks. Accordingly, they vary in risk management, pricing, and compliance policy management.
Also, some compliance management tools are better suited to monitoring activities and change management, while others are geared toward audit management and preparing audit documentation.
Compliance management software can be classified into all-purpose, industry-specific, and GRC (governance, risk, and compliance).
All-Purpose Compliance Management Platforms
This software offers a suite of generic tools that can be used in any company or industry but with a low level of specialization to address remediation of risk, corporate governance, or technical issues.
Industry-Specific Compliance Management Tools
These tools focus on the needs of companies in specific sectors: healthcare, manufacturing, financial, etc. Specialized frameworks structure the compliance requirements of particular regulations such as PCI DSS, HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), and ISO (International Standards Organization).
GRC Software
GRC software includes general compliance management tools and features to ease risk management, monitor compliance risk, and corporate governance tasks. Many incorporate features that connect to other tools that help to streamline compliance workflows and initiatives.
Coupled with industry-specific deployment frameworks, GRC software is the most robust of all three categories.
What Are the Benefits of Compliance Management Software?
A suitable compliance management software can provide various efficiencies so your compliance team can work on more meaningful initiatives.
Reduce Manual Work
Managing requirements and controls in a spreadsheet may start out to be easy but will become overwhelming and time-consuming in the long run. A good compliance management software will grow with your business and help you reflect improvements as they are made. Automated workflows enable easy task management and documentation of corrective actions.
Streamline Implementation
Compliance management software comes loaded with relevant frameworks and templates to streamline implementation. Many regulations have the same requirements, so cross-mapping one requirement to many frameworks is a huge benefit to reducing your compliance efforts. Easy-to-use templates facilitate compliance audits and corrective actions.
Simplify Ongoing Monitoring and Reporting
Software programs can populate real-time dashboards and alert you to compliance issues and red flags. Compliance officers can quickly inform stakeholders with up-to-date metrics on compliance with regulations and industry standards.
How to Pick the Best Compliance Management Tool for You
With so many options and features, several considerations can help you choose the right compliance management tool for your needs and strengthen how you manage the compliance lifecycle.
Mind Your Deployment Needs
Every company has a different IT infrastructure and, therefore, different implementation needs.
For example, some companies may be used to working with internal servers and need an on-premise solution to work seamlessly with the rest of the system. Others may use cloud-based systems and need compliance management tools that operate in the cloud.
Risk and liability are other concerns. While an in-house solution can reduce the number of third parties involved in a software implementation, companies will also have to invest more internal resources to keep that software up-to-date.
On the other hand, the cloud-based solution involves a third party operating in your IT infrastructure, so you’ll need to perform a third-party risk assessment and then monitor that third party.
Look Out For Automation Options
Automation is crucial to reduce operating expenses and maintain consistent performance in large and growing companies. The risk of human error is reduced and your ability to monitor the compliance program’s performance is improved. It can also generate reports promptly and detect compliance failures more quickly.
Diverse Management Capabilities
When choosing a software solution, it’s essential to evaluate how the management capabilities fulfill your needs. A good compliance management software tool must have task management functionality that allows adequate monitoring of policies, projects, and other compliance activities, such as internal auditing, quality management, document management, and more.
Also, a robust compliance management solution must be able to monitor corporate risks. Software that centralizes and facilitates risk assessments are valuable tools for a compliance program to perform effectively.
Regulatory Needs
Every company is subject to a different set of regulations and has additional regulatory requirements accordingly.
Compliance management tools are specifically designed to address specialized regulations and industries, such as HIPAA or GDPR, with user-friendly templates and feature updates when regulatory changes occur.
Streamline Compliance Management with Reciprocity ZenComply
Choosing the right compliance management tool can mean the difference between boosting compliance processes versus hindering your company’s compliance management.
Reciprocity ZenComply is a compliance management software with all the necessary tools to facilitate your company’s risk management and compliance processes.
Packed with various compliance frameworks from different national and international regulations, such as ISO, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and NIST (National Institute of Science and Technology), ZenComply ‘s regulatory compliance platform offers cybersecurity risk assessments, internal audit templates, document management, reporting, and more!
Book your demo today to learn how easily you can protect your company from the risks of non-compliance with ZenComply.
