Many companies view compliance as a box-ticking exercise. You gather evidence, get through the audit, submit the report, and repeat the whole process the following year. This used to be a viable approach because regulations were less complex and the threat landscape was relatively stable. However, this is no longer the case.

A better way to look at it is to consider compliance as part of your risk management program. For nearly every organization, the greatest risk is not a firewall that has not been configured correctly. It’s your employees. Social engineering, mistakes, or abuse are present in 74% of all breaches (Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, 2023). This one statistic should fundamentally change how you think about building any compliance program.

Start by Mapping Your Actual Regulatory Perimeter

It is important to determine the frameworks that you need to be compliant with first so that you can then assess the required controls and create a consolidated control framework for your specific context.

Automate the Repetitive Work Before it Becomes Compliance Fatigue

In bigger organizations, it’s not unusual for your compliance team to be so bogged down in documenting, cross-referencing, and evidence-gathering that they literally don’t have time left to analyze risk. Manually mapping ISO 27001 controls to SOC 2 criteria is precisely the sort of duplicative effort that automation is simply better at than we are.

The same is true for the human side of being compliant. You can’t realistically run an annual security awareness program for a decentralized workforce by emailing employees to book them in, logging those bookings in a spreadsheet, and then following up on no-shows. The logistical end of things is just too consuming. You need workforce security awareness training software to handle enrolment, course delivery, evidence of completion, and record-keeping so that your team can focus instead on monitoring whether the training is causing behavioral change.

Likewise, the audit trail piece matters. You don’t just need to show a regulator or auditor that training happened. You need to be able to point to a time-stamped record that shows who attended and who didn’t without someone in your office having to build that from the ground up for every new course.

Build a Cross-Functional Compliance Committee

Ensuring compliance is not successful if it is managed solely by the IT team or the Legal team. When compliance is the responsibility of the IT team, controls may be put in place without a full comprehension of the policy or organizational intention. When compliance is left to the Legal team, they may write policies that the technical team can’t implement due to inherent limitations in the technology. Unfortunately, neither the IT team nor the Legal team has HR reporting to them, so the people who manage training, onboarding, and discipline are often left without guidance or expectations.

The companies that make it through the complex, multi-framework compliance without exhausting their team tend to have a Compliance Committee that meets monthly and includes folks from IT, Legal, HR, and Operations. This committee receives regular reports from all the owners of risk and compliance within the organization and reviews updates to all relevant regulations and community publications.

This is also the committee that owns third-party risk, which regulators are making much more difficult to prove now. It used to be that if your controls were well-architected and effectively monitored, you were probably safe from fines and penalties. That has recently been replaced by the expectation that the controls of your vendors and supply chain partners must also meet an equivalently high standard. A breach at a supplier is technically your breach, in every meaningful sense of the word.

The Human Firewall Has to be Built Continuously

One of the most common compliance misconceptions is that the annual training meets the “security awareness” rule. It checks off the box. It does not, however, build the human firewall.

Social engineering and phishing attacks change more quickly than the annual training schedule. An employee who clicked through a January phishing test may not be any more prepared to identify a convincing spear-phishing attempt in October that plays to their emotions. Shorter, more regular training combined with ongoing simulated phishing campaigns will lead to measurable improvements in resilience compared to an annual session.

Human Risk Management views employees differently. Rather than being a layer to build controls around, employees are treated as a control layer to be actively managed and strengthened. Your Zero Trust Architecture will handle the machine-to-machine authentication. No technology model will handle the employee who is genuinely convinced they are simply replying to the CFO’s request.

Compliance as a Competitive Signal

A good case can be made that mature compliance programs are a brand asset. New enterprise customers demand SOC 2 reports or ISO 27001 certification before closing deals. Having a viable data governance program to reference can fast-track a procurement discussion that would grind to a halt otherwise.

The companies that achieve this don’t do so by simply hiring more compliance attorneys. They automate the operational load, create cross-functional responsibility, and treat the human portion of the equation with enough respect to keep investing in it year after year. This is how you transform a cost center into a source of advantage.