Compliance can seem like a shifting goal. Regulators are continually adding policies and requirements, making the process more complex and time consuming. While this can sometimes feel like a blocker, it is designed to keep organizations secure and ensure that processes are managed consistently across the board.
In this article we’ll consider how best to set up a compliance automation program, allowing you to ensure consistency in terms of your own compliance, while reducing the amount of manual workload for your staff to undertake.
The Automation Challenge
The case for compliance has been made before and is widely understood. Regardless of your individual opinion of compliance regulations, many of them have crossed into legal mandates. Areas around PII and data privacy, for example, are now controlled by frameworks like GDPR and CCPA. Even the acts that are not law may dictate your eligibility to operate within a specific sector, location, or industry.
Common Pitfalls With Manual Automation
The challenge for organizations is how to automate the process of automating compliance policies and reporting. Trying to manage compliance manually can be very time consuming, and can lead to several risks:
- Errors multiply – Manual tracking of compliance areas can lead to a higher error rate than carrying out the tasks manually. With so many overlapping regulations, it is almost impossible to know every policy all of the time. Solution: Automated tracking is fantastic for cross checking data, ensuring that policies are enforced and loopholes are identified.
- Team burnout – Compliance reports often come with tight deadlines. This can increase stress on staff, resulting in burnout and dropout. Solution: Automation shifts the workload burden from staff and onto systems. This allows humans to be part of the process, rather than the whole process sitting on their shoulders.
- Loss of visibility – Compliance gaps will remain present until someone notices them. That may sound like an obvious point, but how are you going to find something that you don’t know exists. Solution: Automated systems will search through every possibility that is open to them. This means that as long as your policies are correctly configured, automated systems will enforce them reliably.
How To Build A Compliance Automation Program
Automation can solve many of the challenges raised above. When it comes to putting this into practice, we’ve broken the process down into several steps to follow. This begins with finding the right tooling that matches your organization in terms of scale and capabilities.
We’ve put together a shortlist of the Best Compliance Automation Tools, highlighting the specific use cases that they are best suited to.
Once you’ve identified the best platform for your organization and needs, look through the following points to make sure you build effective processes.
- Map your obligations first – Start by listing every framework and regulation that you need to prove compliance with. This will allow you to identify overlapping areas, while ensuring that nothing is missed.
- Centralize before you automate – Ensure that everything is connected before you start. Make sure you can manage your policies and controls from one place, with your evidence being collated in a clear, logical way.
- Automate evidence collection, beyond setting reminders – It can be helpful to set reminders of when tasks need to be completed, but this is not true automation. If you’re going to the effort of setting up automation, make sure it genuinely improves your experience.
- Build alerting and remediation workflows – Automation is great as it frees your staff up to carry out other tasks. However, if an issue arises there needs to be a clear chain of command, defining who gets notified and who can find solutions.
- Keep a Human in the Loop – While similar to the previous point, it’s important that humans remain in the loop. Not only does this allow you to address errors, but it confirms to auditors and regulators that you still have oversight. Automation should not result in less responsibility.
- Train staff on the new system – For your platform and processes to be effective, you’ll want to ensure that everyone in your organization is pulling in the same direction. This means onboarding new employees, while ensuring that existing employees are up to speed.
- Review and expand as you scale – As your organization grows and evolves, your processes and tooling should be revised and updated, ensuring that any framework updates are accounted for, any new regions or sectors are considered, and that you still have oversight over every area you ought to.
Bottom Line
While setting up and configuring a compliance program may mark a significant time investment to get right, the savings beyond this are invaluable. Being able to free up your human resource to spend time on other tasks, ensuring that compliance is monitored consistently, and remaining up to date with evolving regulation makes the effort worthwhile.
