Given today’s changing security environment, it’s understandable that businesses want to be proactive when it comes to threats, build a continuous compliance climate, and have agile IT operations. Maintaining the security and privacy of customers is a major concern for businesses and the IT organizations that support them as data breaches become more widespread, even among the world’s largest corporations. With cyber threats rapidly developing, new data security and privacy compliance regulations are being introduced and implemented. It’s never easy to stay compliant. In the end, however, the concept that security and compliance must be an integral part of all business practices makes perfect sense. Even so, the purpose of security compliance policies is to assist businesses in maintaining the integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility of their information systems. They provide a set of rules and guidelines to assist companies in safeguarding their systems and data against security threats.
Differences Between Compliance and Security
While compliance is comparable to security in that it compels a company to exercise due diligence in protecting its digital assets, compliance has a different motivation: It revolves around the demands of a third party, such as the government, a security framework, or the terms of a client’s contract. Compliance should be regarded as a view of how your security program complies with a particular set of security requirements, rather than a comprehensive strategy that addresses all of your security requirements. Below are snippets of each other’s definitions:
Compliance – Compliance standards are issued as a minimum bar for security by risk management teams who oversee compliance. Audits or evaluations, which may be self-administered or coordinated by a third party, are used to verify that the implemented controls meet the requirements outlined by the chosen compliance standard. Compliance needs may be set by government legislation, industry standard, or other sources. Examples of common compliance standards that a business may be required to meet are: PCI DSS – Used by all businesses that process Credit Card information, and ISO/EIC 27000:2018 – A International standard governing Information Security Management Systems.
Security – Security is the result of implementing Policies, Standards, Guidelines, and Procedures put in place to protect and defend an organization’s assets. Security is measured in a variety of ways, often comparing risk before and after implementing a control, and the cost to the business of implementing this control. The three categories of security controls are: Physical; Logical/Technical; and Administrative. These categories encompass everything from locks on the door to intrusion detection systems on the network. Security requires regular review of threats and the assets that are being protected to remain useful. Compliance in your organization does not imply security, and the two are not synonymous.
Is Security More Important than Compliance?
Compliance is an important part of any security campaign, new vulnerabilities and risks emerge on a regular basis, which can only be handled by continuously updating your security practices – which may go farther than what your compliance regulations require. This means that whether companies are compliant, they must take a more proactive approach to information security and adopt the appropriate security measures to safeguard their operations. Compliance in any industry guides security practices for a business and assists in reducing risk and keeping business assets secure.
Top Six Security Checklist
- Begin with the infrastructure’s core. Those who are in business for a long time are much more likely to have locked on a range of one-time solutions found in compliance software, often at the expense of excessive IT running costs to retain obsolete structures and outdated code. This suggests you’re missing out on the latest, potentially more secure technologies, such as cloud-based solutions, that could be much less expensive.
- Conduct a security audit. Many companies have been dealing with information security issues for decades, but recent events have shown that traditional approaches are no longer sufficient. Most organizations have failed to keep up with the rapid evolution of information security risks. At least once a year, a comprehensive security audit and a separate compliance audit should be conducted.
- Automate your software updates. Operating systems and software that aren’t updated on a regular basis expose a company’s IT systems to vulnerabilities. When devices are not kept up to date on a regular basis, attackers will write code to exploit vulnerabilities. We cannot emphasize how critical it is to keep your computers and servers up to date with the most recent software and patches.
- Adopt sensitive data encryption. Exposure of sensitive data, whether accidental or malicious, is a company’s worst nightmare. Encrypt the data itself, both “in motion” (think email, downloading documents, etc.) and “at rest” to be truly safe (think file servers, endpoint devices, and even the cloud.). To protect customer information, data encryption is especially important.
- Phishing training should be given to your employees. The most serious cybersecurity threats are found right inside your company’s walls. Employees are thought to be responsible for more than 60% of data breaches, most of which are caused by phishing attacks. Employees will benefit greatly from ongoing phishing prevention training.
- Deploy Data Recovery (DR) and business continuity solutions. Every company, big or small, now requires successful backup and data recovery (BDR). Data recovery should include standardized efforts such as regularly conducted recovery tests, weekly tested backup systems, data classified as business-critical or strategic and backed up accordingly, and off-premise data backup, regardless of whether it is cloud-based, on-premise, or both.
Bottom line: just because compliance doesn’t guarantee that all security requirements are met doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing; it simply means you need to do more. Compliance is a good starting point, but it isn’t enough to eliminate all risks. Compliance frameworks and tools are available to meet the needs of your company. Employees should be educated on what compliance requirements and processes they are expected to follow through security programs. That means the whole organization is doing this, not just security and compliance teams.
