As more and more enterprises are coming under the scrutiny of data regulators and authorities due to notorious data breaches, the price of consumers’ personal information and other highly sensitive data is soaring higher than ever. On the other hand, the global average cost per data breach amounts to $4.35 million. Among all industries, the healthcare industry continues to be the top-most target for cyber attackers due to a number of reasons.
So, whether it's the healthcare providers or the security leaders of other highly regulated industries such as the public sector, BFSI, energy, or chemical manufacturing, maintaining compliance demands a new, more stringent approach. However, sometimes, for these business organizations, effective compliance management itself becomes a challenge than the compliance itself due to a lack of skilled resources, the constantly changing landscape, disconnected systems, high dependence on manual systems, incomplete metrics, lack of automated documentation mechanism, or siloed functions.
While governments across the globe have taken cognizance of the mounting compliance burden and agreed to take steps to ensure ease of doing business, the responsibility to comply with the crucial data regulations and compliance requirements continues to lie with organizations dealing with sensitive data. It's this crossroad of regulatory compliance that leads to the need for a third-party service provider adept in risk management and fluent in regulatory requirements.
Enters Compliance-as-a-Service in the picture.
What is Compliance-as-a-Service or CaaS?
Compliance-as-a-Service is a cloud-based solution conceptualized and designed to help organizations, whether business, public sector or non-profit, store customers data and manage compliance in a secure and effective way.
A Compliance-as-a-Service provider usually has an arsenal of compliance experts, tools, technologies, and industry knowledge, required to support the varied compliance goals of small-scale, medium, and large organizations. Leading CaaS providers come equipped with pre-met global compliance needs based on specific standards or regulations. For example, some CaaS provider might offer specialized CaaS solution for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Some other might focus on the financial regulation, Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX).
What are the Advantages of Compliance-as-a-Service?
Irrespective of the size or specialization of the Compliance-as-a-Service offerings, the central objective of CaaS providers is to reduce the compliance burden for enterprises. But that's just a thousand-feet-above view of the benefits. The real benefits of compliance-as-a-service go much deeper in length and breadth. Let's explore the most important benefits of outsourcing your governance, risk, and compliance management responsibilities to a compliance service provider:
- Your organization gets instant access to the industry-best compliance experts and specialists who are adept with the constantly changing compliance landscape and possess the right knowledge to alleviate your compliance concerns.
- You are provided with advanced cybersecurity and risk assessment and management as part of the CaaS package, and that helps you in preventing data breaches.
- Your organization is now always at-par with a wide range of national and global regulatory standards, for example, SAMA, FINMA, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, ISP, IRAP, and more. Seamless compliance no longer seems impossible to you.
- Often the CaaS solutions providers offer personalized consulting, audit, and processes specific to industry-related regulatory compliance, to meet your exact business needs.
- You also get access to data protection and data residency solutions which otherwise can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive job for both smaller companies and large enterprises.
- As Compliance-as-a-service is a comparatively new solution in the market, the majority of the CaaS providers leverage automation, intelligent analytics, and other latest technologies for a compliance audit, risk assessment, preparing documentation, or conducting deep risk and security analysis.
What Makes Compliance-as-a-Service a Must for Every Enterprise Today?
Now, as we have discussed the major advantages of CaaS, let's understand what has been driving the adoption of compliance services in the past few years.
- Escalating operations and management costs caused by frequently altering regulatory changes
- Lack of awareness regarding what specific regulations to comply with
- Alert fatigue of security teams leading to compromised security measures
- The massive adoption of cloud services across industries without a strategic approach to meet compliance concerns
- Lack of a dedicated team of compliance experts to oversee business operations
- Time-consuming manual practices to maintain compliance
The Need for Effective Regulatory Compliance: Final Thoughts
It's a no-brainer that the compliance landscape is becoming more complex as every nation is focusing on strengthening its data protection and other laws demanding enterprises to follow stringent measures or pay hefty fines. To navigate this complex landscape without losing focus on your core business means reducing your compliance burden ASAP. Finding the right compliance-as-a-service provider will not only help you save your organization from any untoward incident but also give it a competitive edge.
Cloud4C offers end-to-end governance and risk compliance management or Compliance-as-a-Service capabilities powered by 40+ security controls, 25+ CoE, 2000+ global cloud experts, and the experience of serving 4000+ enterprises, including 60 of Fortune 500 across 25+ countries. For more information, click here.
