Compliance as a Service: How to Implement it

There was a time when organizations rarely considered compliance as a function that required outsourcing. However, when compliance began to emerge as a more prominent component in business negotiations and contracts, not being compliant became a business impediment. As a result compliance garnered more attention and became an essential part of growth. 

Fast forward to today, the Global compliance as a service market is expected to grow to USD 19.5 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of 17%. Businesses now see compliance as a service as a catalyst for efficiency, resilience and audit readiness. 

Switching to CaaS solutions has brought businesses several benefits besides streamlined compliance management. These include better security posture and a culture of security consciousness, making it an advantageous arrangement.

In this blog, we’ll learn what is CaaS, which businesses need to consider this model, the benefits and challenges, and ways to integrate it in your operations. 

What is Compliance as a Service?

Compliance as a service (CaaS) is a business model that enables organizations to outsource regulatory compliance management to third-party compliance experts. CaaS platforms assist companies with compliance implementation, monitoring, maintenance, and reporting to help them consistently meet regulatory compliance requirements and achieve audit readiness quickly.

Why do you need compliance as a service?

When companies embark on compliance, founders and stakeholders experience overwhelming amounts of pressure. They learn that compliance is more than just a one-time exercise that is handled by IT teams. The documentation process is painful and often involves numerous budget-heavy investments—on the technological and expertise front.

Compliance as a service (CaaS) is a smarter alternative to overcome regulatory pressure and compliance concerns. Businesses can leverage the specialized knowledge of compliance service providers to decode the complex regulatory landscape. A CaaS expert helps by guiding the organization on implementation and gives them access to technologies that suit their specific needs.

Who needs to consider the CaaS Model?

Any business looking to outsource complex compliance processes and streamline operations can consider the CaaS model. However, certain verticals and industries may come with additional regulatory requirements and challenges which organizations must consider. 

Healthcare organizations

The healthcare industry is a heavily regulated industry—it has a number of regulatory requirements to adhere to such as HIPAA and HITRUST. The most common challenges that organizations in the healthcare space face are difficulty in defining scope, protecting ePHI when working with vendors, allocating resources for implementation, and setting up an effective breach response plan.

CaaS can help navigate these challenges with comprehensive risk assessments, automated workflows, continuous compliance monitoring, and audit support.

Financial institutions

Financial institutions looking to comply with standards like PCI DSS find it challenging to secure the cardholder data environment. They must create security policies, adhere to quarterly vulnerability scan requirements, fill out self-assessment questionnaires, and more.

Compliance as a service can provide expert advice, help with policy development, and offer a suite of automated solutions for meeting such regulatory requirements.

Cloud-driven organizations

Cloud-based businesses are entrusted with the responsibility to ensure data privacy and security of customers. Their clients enquire about adherence to regulations and standards like GDPR, SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST, etc. The biggest challenge for these businesses is understanding the applicability of requirements, mapping them to controls, and aligning them to the standards quickly.

CaaS platforms can help here with customized ready-to-launch compliance programs, automated checks, security training modules, vendor management, and more.

Other highly regulated businesses

Government organizations, e-commerce platforms, and other regulated businesses like energy and utilities, environmental services, etc. are also subject to several compliance regulations. Compliance as a service can help these businesses focus on key operations while automating risk assessments, monitoring control implementation, and generating reports. 

How to implement the CaaS Model?

Implementing the CaaS model involves a lot of preliminary work such as assessing the current state of compliance, finalizing needs and running assessments. The CaaS approach makes it significantly easier to interpret and execute the requirements efficiently by bringing in expertise and technological support.

Take a look at how the CaaS model is implemented:

Assess the requirements

Start with identifying the applicable regulatory compliance requirements and assessing the organization’s current compliance maturity. This involves mapping controls to the relevant frameworks and conducting thorough risk assessments to understand the organization’s risk profile. It paints a clear picture of the compliance gap that needs to be filled to reach the desired state.

Choose your CaaS vendor

Select a compliance as a service vendor based on your compliance requirements and the vendor’s area of expertise. Look for case studies, testimonials, G2 reviews, and other social proofs to validate vendor reputation and experience. Undergo trials and demos and enquire about costs to understand if the venor fits your bill. Sign an SLA (service level agreement) to have the terms and conditions of service finalized—scope of service, level of support, implementation coverage etc.

Sprinto can be your CaaS vendor with its automation-led compliance capabilities, widest compliance coverage and expert-led implementation. It integrates deeply with your systems (100+ integrations) to deploy fully aiutomated checks, monitor compliance continuously and fix security issues fast.

Begin with setup

The CaaS vendor runs through the assessment reports and gap analysis to prepare for setup and implementation. The vendor suggests new policies and SOPs that need to be created. Training modules are also finalized. Among the many other tasks within the set up phase, key entities are assigned roles and responsibilities before reporting dashboards are integrated, to help with the monitoring process.

Implementation phase

The implementation phase activates the compliance machinery with policy acknowledgments. Security training is published across the organization and employee training modules become a periodical requirement. Other key compliance tasks are assigned to employees based on role definition, to remediate issues and achieve baseline compliance. Compliance checks are monitored for a set review period.

Documentation and reporting

All documents related to compliance efforts (network diagrams, organizational charts, screenshots of control checks, etc.) are collected and maintained for audit purposes. A comprehensive report is generated to determine progress and identify loopholes. The CaaS vendor then suggests improvements for remediation before final audit readiness assessments.

Audit readiness

The final step determines your preparedness for the external audit. The CaaS vendor initiates readiness assessments if included in the scope of services. The final evidence is reviewed, a sample of controls tested, and a post-assessment summary is generated for any last minute corrections. The organization can then proceed with an independent compliance audit from a third-party vendor.

Also check: 7 Best Compliance Automation Tools

How to automate Caas solution?

Automated compliance as a service uses technological and Artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to enhance compliance workflow efficiency. It eliminates the need for manual assessments and routine tasks and minimizes the risks of compliance misses. 

Here’s how an automated CaaS works:

Integrate to set up

With CaaS automation, you simply have to integrate your existing cloud stack with the platform. Next, the following key tasks need to be performed

• Enable a compliance framework and select controls. These controls will automatically be mapped to the selected frameworks, however, you will need to decide the applicability.
• Assign roles and responsibilities to critical assets.

Sprinto advantage:

1. You can bring your own frameworks and controls and activate checks with Sprinto.

2. You can simultaneously prepare for multiple compliance standards as Sprinto maps common controls. For example, if background checks are required for both SOC 2 and ISO 27001, enabling it once will satisfy the requirements of both frameworks together.

Activate implementation

Next, an integrated risk assessment will be triggered to understand the scope, identify compliance gaps, and activate automated checks. Streamlined workflows will ensure policy acknowledgments, timely security training, and maintenance of logs and document management..

Sprinto advantage:

1. Sprinto features a risk library covering most risks faced by tech companies. Quantitative risk assessment exercises and a comprehensive risk matrix gives you a bird’s eye view of your risk profile.

2. Gain out-of-the-box compliance policy support, in-built training modules, centralized document management, and automated workflows for efficient compliance management.

Ensure zero failing checks

Enable 24/7 compliance monitoring to acquire real-time insights on adherence to compliance requirements and failing controls. Proactive alerts will be sent to initiate quick action in case of any compliance loopholes arise or if controls fail to reach the >90% threshold.

Sprinto advantage:

Access real-time compliance reporting of compliance on the health dashboard and automate alerts with escalations based on criticality—critical, high, medium, and low.

Breeze through audits

The platform automatically collects evidence for audit purposes. The evidence is managed at a centralized place and also mapped to relevant control checks. This makes it easier for the auditor to access evidence and understand context.

Sprinto advantage:

Sprinto contains an independent audit dashboard and a comprehensive network of audit partners.

Benefits of compliance as a service

Compliance as a service makes compliance initiatives simpler, affordable, and scalable. These platforms are feature-packed to help align business goals and context to regulatory requirements and help them prepare for audits in weeks rather than months.

Let’s look at some benefits of CaaS as a service:

Cost-efficient

CaaS platforms eliminate the need to hire and train in-house compliance experts. They bring automation capabilities and proactive support from professionals. This makes them a cost-effective alternative, especially for small and medium-sized organizations.

Sprinto as a CaaS platform can reduce the costs of compliance drastically with its adaptive automation and guided implementation.

Drives scalability

As organizations expand, compliance as a service solutions can quickly adapt to accommodate the increasing volume of data and compliance requirements. These solutions can also help prepare businesses simultaneously for multiple frameworks with minimal disruption by mapping commonalities.

DNIF was able to get SOC 2 and ISO 27001 audit-ready in 14 days. Too good to be true? Read on.

Prioritize core functions

CaaS platforms reduce compliance burden by automating tasks like document management, risk assessments, reporting, evidence collection, etc. This bandwidth can be used to focus on strategic imperative functions.

Reduces non-compliance risks

CaaS solutions facilitate regular compliance monitoring, assessments, gap analysis and real-time reporting of compliance status. They also help organizations stay updated with regulatory changes and minimize risks associated with non-compliance—penalties, lawsuits, reputational damage, etc.

Encourages flexibility

CaaS platforms can align with every organization’s unique needs. You can view customized reports and can also bring your own controls and frameworks without losing archived work.

Also check: Why are Companies Choosing SOC as a Service?

Challenges of CaaS model

CaaS vendors can bring several challenges to the organization when not selected carefully. If the sensitive data is not in the right hands, there can be potential security breaches. Then, there can be scalability issues and difficulty in adapting to technicalities.

Some common challenges of CaaS model include:

Data security concerns

Choosing a CaaS platform for compliance management and implementation requires entrusting a third-party organization with sensitive data. If a reliable vendor is not chosen, there can be possible data security concerns and breaches

Get assured about Sprinto’s security here

Increased dependency, limited control

CaaS solutions collect a lot of sensitive data for executing compliance functions and may also have access controls and permissions. This can dilute the organization’s level of direct control over data and can increase its dependency on the solution to ensure compliance adherence.

Technical jargons

It is common for CaaS platforms to use technical jargon related to regulatory and compliance requirements. This makes the learning curve steeper and non-technical stakeholders may find it challenging to understand requirements.

Integration challenges

Organizations need to integrate their IT infrastructure with CaaS platforms for monitoring, maintenance, and evidence collection. Solutions that have limited integration options pose implementation and scalability challenges for businesses.

Automate compliance management with Sprinto

Outsourcing compliance has made it easier for businesses to reach the certification stage fast. They can easily display certifications on their websites or with the help of a trust center—this helps build trust and even shorten the sales cycle. Turning to automation has streamlined the process further, replacing months of work and manhours to weeks of automated tasks.

 Sprinto is a powerful product that automates compliance and drives sales enablement for forward-thinking businesses. With Sprinto, compliance isn’t just a one-time endeavor but a gateway to sustained, continuous compliance.

Looking to automate your compliance journey? Talk to our experts today and we’ll help you get started.

FAQs

What are some compliance as a service examples?

Compliance as a service examples include compliance management software, compliance reporting tools, vendor risk management tools, audit support services etc.

How to select the right CaaS provider?

You can select the right CaaS provider with the right research and involvement of key stakeholders. Check for vendor reputation and experience, vendor’s tech stack and integration options, support facilities and features. Compare pricing with competitors and finalize after taking a trial where you must ask all your questions.

What are the costs associated with CaaS?

The costs associated with CaaS can vary depending on provider services. However, broadly the costs can include subscription costs, implementation costs, and ongoing compliance support costs. There can also be additional costs for add-on features.