Compliance Best Practices: How to Stay Ahead of Regulatory Challenges 

Anwita

Anwita

Jan 31, 2025

Running compliance projects is pretty much like a circus. You are juggling multiple things at once—all goes fine until an important bit fails, and chaos unfolds. Before you know it, your team is putting out fires, trying to put broken systems back together, and not knowing how to keep things in motion. 

While there is no way to ensure everything runs smoothly, following a few compliance best practices can certainly help you manage things better and ultimately reduce chaos. 

TL;DR

Compliance ensures businesses follow internal policies and regulatory frameworks to avoid risks, legal penalties, and operational disruptions. Best compliance practices include risk assessment, strong compliance culture, continuous monitoring, tracking key metrics, internal audits, and automation. Major challenges include keeping up with evolving regulations, balancing security with operations, and managing third-party risks.

What is compliance?

In a corporate environment, compliance refers to the adherence to internal governance practices and policies, compulsory industry standards, and regulatory frameworks. Depending on the type of compliance and who the overseeing body is, the failure to stay compliant can lead to security lapses, legal penalties, and slowed down business growth. 

What are the best practices of compliance management?

Managing compliance efforts becomes a lot easier when you follow the best practices that have worked for all industries:

Know your risks

As global regulations become increasingly complex and businesses expand, organizations are exposed to a greater degree of risks. This may be failure to adhere to legal obligations, security threats, or even poor strategy. 

Risk cannot be mitigated unless you know it’s there. And this is particularly dangerous given that compliance risks directly translate to legal fines, reputational damage, and may even cause halts in operations. 

To understand your risk exposure, compile a list of security, compliance, and reputational risks that exist within your ecosystem. Then, assess which risks have a higher potential for damage and occurrence. 

This will help you prioritize risks, map them to the right owners, and develop a mitigation plan. Frameworks like NIST Risk Management Framework or ISO 27001 can significantly help in organizing and addressing risks based on domain and category. 

Think deeply about culture

The tipping point to a good compliance culture starts with building the right culture. Setting the tone at the top—senior management, board members, and chief compliance officers are key instigators. The idea is to oversee end-to-end processes, allocate resources to the right places, and communicate expectations with the stakeholders. 

Once the tone is set, the board should ensure that ethical and compliance practices are built into actionable strategy and measurable metrics. 

However, every employee is accountable for and responsible for maintaining compliance. To build a security and compliance-first culture, include training programs for new employees and conduct tests to ensure they understand their role. Existing employees should also undergo training to keep up with changes and refresh previous learning. 

Monitor your infrastructure

One key objective that regulatory frameworks address is minimizing exposure to issues that may potentially transform into costly affairs. Monitoring helps to understand these issues and gaps, which is critical for compliance teams to patch them as soon as possible. 

“When properly designed, a monitoring program should trigger an early warning indicator that something is happening in the business that could create an ethics or compliance failure.” 

Laurie Eissler, director, Deloitte Advisory, Deloitte 

Design a risk-based, independent compliance oversight process to assess and report on the effectiveness of compliance controls and policy adherence. Configure the program to continuously monitor control performance, risk indicators, and potential compliance violations.  

Monitoring activities, whether automated or not, should be performed on an ongoing basis. This is critical to analyzing changes and emerging risks to gather information on weaknesses in the compliance program. 

Track key metrics

When you set up a compliance program, it’s not enough just to have one in place, you need to know how well it’s working. To do this, you need to track compliance metrics, which are measures of how effectively your program is achieving its goals. 

These metrics help you evaluate both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of your program’s success.

Remember that the metrics you choose must be honest, accurate, and reflect the true state of your program. Manipulating data or “cherry-picking” favorable results can undermine the purpose of compliance altogether. Ethics demand transparency in how metrics are collected, measured, and reported.

With that being said, compliance metrics are measured in terms of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). When you track KPIs, it paints a high definition picture of how well your compliance program is performing against internal policies, external regulations, and from a cost perspective (mitigating instances of non-compliance and proactively addressing risk). 

The U.S. Department of Justice suggests that when you are evaluating your compliance program, you should focus on their effectiveness. To do that, they recommend businesses ask themselves a few key questions about how the program is actually performing: 

  • Is the corporation’s compliance program well designed?
  • Is the program applied earnestly and in good faith
  • Does the compliance program work in practice?

To answer these questions, measure these metrics:

  • Number of compliance audits conducted
  • Percentage of compliance issues resolved before escalation
  • Frequency of compliance violations
  • Cost of compliance program implementation vs. potential fines or penalties
  • Employee participation rate in compliance training programs
  • Incident response time to compliance breaches
  • Number of reported compliance-related whistleblower incidents
  • Rate of regulatory changes tracked and addressed in the program
  • Third-party compliance assessment results
  • Customer satisfaction related to compliance transparency

Conduct internal audits 

Most businesses conduct audits out of compulsion and to prove compliance to external regulatory bodies. This pushes companies into a cycle of patching gaps and sweeping non-compliant issues under the rug at the last minute. Culturally, this is a poor practice and a recipe for disaster. 

Conducting an internal audit is a best practice for compliance that helps you stay continuously compliant. This helps you demonstrate compliance to external stakeholders and prospects, as it keeps your business ready for surveillance at any time.

Moreover, internal audit programs are critical in keeping track of the number of violations, total amount of penalties, and the compliance program’s effectiveness. Internal audits also help determine compliance costs and areas of focus for the next budget. Given that security lapses and violations impact the bottom line, audits are useful when it comes to financial planning. 

Accessibility is an enabler 

Compliance tools can be complex, especially when users need to understand compliance reports, understand regulations, or track audits. To address this, you need to streamline your processes and systems to be more accessible and inclusive.

Here’s what you can do to make accessibility as an enabler:

  • Start by building a repository of commonly used and requested documents in a central repository.
  • Set up an automated Role-based Access Management system that enables access requests based on pre-defined organization roles.
  • Conduct regular training sessions on how to use GRC tools, with a focus on accessibility features.
  • For tasks like compliance reporting, risk assessments, or audits, create clear, written instructions or interactive walkthroughs to guide users through each process.
  • Avoid legal jargon or overly technical terms in reports, instructions, and alerts. Use simple, straightforward language that everyone can understand.

Automation is your friend 

Setting up and running a compliance program from scratch, especially if you are doing it for the first time can be challenging, chaotic, and complicated. Such projects involve multiple moving parts, managing them requires time, cost, and effort – which is why business leaders look at compliance obligations as a burdensome cost center. 

When you use an automation system, the cost center translates to a competitive advantage. Organizations that adopt compliance automation tools reported significant reductions in costs, manual effort, and time to reach audit readiness. 

These tools continuously monitor controls against compliance requirements, automatically collects evidence, and flags any risks. This means you’re always audit-ready, with fewer surprises when audits roll around.

Also, automation helps consolidate multiple tools into one system. Instead of using separate tools for different tasks, everything is streamlined, making the whole process  easier to manage and scalable. This also means better control, less duplication, and a clearer path to meeting regulatory requirements.

Challenges of compliance

It is critical to understand the challenges of managing a compliance program to function more effectively: 

  • Keeping up with the dynamic nature of frameworks: Regulations are constantly evolving. New clauses on control requirements and risk assessment obligations are introduced or removed every day. Organizations must keep up with these new requirements to avoid falling out of compliance status. This often strains resources and leads to compliance gaps. 
  • Balancing security and operations: Strict security controls often slow down business operations and wreck workflows, negatively impacting productivity. This puts pressure on management to find a balance between security measures and operational efficiency, all of which requires strategic planning and stakeholder cooperation.
  • Managing third-party risks: Vendors and third parties often introduce unpredictable and unprecedented risks to the IT environment. To avoid risks from escalating into a threat incident, organizations must assess, monitor, and implement security controls for all external partners and service providers.  

How to overcome compliance challenges

Most organizations focus on compliance at certain times of the year. This is a bad practice, as it often leaves them rushing through control testing, patching gaps, and scrambling for evidence collection. Ultimately, it costs IT teams their sanity and audit. 

The solution to this mess? Compliance automation tools like Sprinto, are designed for cloud-first companies. It supports over 20 compliance frameworks and helps you effortlessly map and monitor controls. 

The platform integrates with 200+ cloud services, using read-only audit permissions to provide granular compliance monitoring. API-based evidence captured directly from source systems delivers real-time compliance insights. 

  • Continuous control monitoring: Use integrations and custom APIs to monitor cloud apps, infrastructure, devices, and people in real-time.
  • Policy management: Skip the hassle of creating policies from scratch with pre-built templates and ensure org-wide acknowledgments.
  • Role-based access management: Gain visibility into users accessing critical systems, identify misconfigurations, and secure your environment proactively.
  • Vulnerability and incident management: Document and manage vulnerabilities and incidents until resolution, capturing corrective actions in one place.
  • Modular training programs: Deploy built-in security training modules across your organization and track completion rates to boost compliance awareness.
  • Automated evidence collection: Collect audit-grade evidence automatically and accurately to streamline audits.
  • Reporting dashboard: Access a detailed health dashboard and reports to see risks, controls, and checks clearly.
  • Shareable security posture: To build trust and credibility, share your live compliance status and security posture with clients and partners.

Speak to our experts today to ease your compliance journey!

FAQs

What five 5 factors must a compliance plan include?

A compliance plan must include clear policies, regular risk assessments, ongoing training, monitoring and audits, and a defined incident response process to ensure ad