Automated Compliance Definition

What is Automated Compliance?

Compliance management is a complex and expanding challenge for many organizations. The introduction of new regulations, technologies, and cyber threats has made it much more difficult for organizations to achieve, track, and report on their compliance.

Automated compliance management solutions are designed to make the compliance process easier for organizations. Instead of manually managing configurations and generating reports, an automated tool does so, reducing the compliance workload. As a result, organizations are able to keep abreast of their growing compliance responsibilities.

How Does Automated Compliance Work?

Data protection regulations have grown more numerous and stringent in recent years. Companies are subject to numerous regulations including general data protection ones (GDPR, CCPA, etc.), industry-specific ones (PCI DSS, HIPAA), and ones focused on transparency and fraud prevention (KYC/AML, SOX, etc.). Complying with these regulations — and demonstrating that compliance to regulators — has become an increasingly complex and demanding task.

Automated compliance management solutions are designed to help take some of the burden of compliance management off of an organization’s personnel. By using artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA), automated compliance can tackle the following tasks:

• Continuous Monitoring: Automated compliance and security solutions can be programmed with the requirements of various regulations. This allows them to monitor for and alter personnel of any compliance gaps within an organization’s systems, reducing the monitoring burden on security personnel.
• Configuration Management: Ensuring that settings are securely configured is a major component of compliance management. Automated tools can look for and potentially correct security misconfigurations, reducing the potential risk of cyberattack and regulatory non-compliance.
• Process Optimization: AI is extremely effective at processing massive amounts of information and identifying anomalies, trends, or errors. This can help to optimize processes by identifying errors in data or pointing out inefficiencies or inconsistencies that require additional review.
• Automated Reporting: Compliance reporting requires collecting and analyzing large volumes of data to generate a compliance report. With a deep understanding of applicable regulations, automated compliance tools can automate the process of collecting the data and populating the fields in a report template.

Benefits of Automated Compliance

Automated compliance tools are designed to reduce the burden of regulatory compliance. Some of the benefits that they offer include:

• Faster Remediation: Compliance tools can automatically find and potentially fix compliance gaps. This enables an organization to minimize non-compliance and the risk of an attacker exploiting these security holes.
• Streamlined Processes: These tools can streamline processes by automating tedious and repeated processes. By eliminating these responsibilities, personnel can focus their efforts where they are most needed.
• Centralized Management: Compliance tools connect to various elements of an organization’s security architecture and collect data in a single place. This enables an organization to monitor and manage its compliance posture from a single dashboard.
• Continuous Improvement: Compliance tools often offer various metrics to track an organization’s current compliance level and past progress. This supports a data-driven approach to improving compliance and demonstrates return on investment (ROI) for compliance efforts.
• Simplified Reporting: Automated tools can perform the tasks of collecting data and generating compliance reports. This eliminates much of the burden of compliance reporting and reduces the risk of reporting errors.

Conclusion

Regulatory compliance requirements are on a trajectory where organizations will be required to comply with a greater range of regulations, and these regulations are likely to have stricter requirements designed to ensure the privacy and security of users’ data despite advanced cyber threats. Automated compliance offers companies the ability to more efficiently and effectively manage their compliance efforts by relying on automated tools to rapidly identify issues, provide valuable visibility, and generate reports.