The Ultimate Compliance Checklist for All Your Compliance Woes

Staring down a mountain of compliance regulations can feel like being dropped blindfolded in the middle of nowhere. You feel lost, struggling to find the starting point, clueless about which compliance frameworks to comply with, what steps to take, and in what order. Yikes! 

Compliance shouldn’t be this frustrating. Period! 

This checklist makes it all easy, helping you identify the relevant compliance frameworks you need, the steps you need to follow, and the order in which you need to implement them for maximum efficiency. 

But before we begin with the checklist, remember that compliance checklists are just the beginning. True success lies in cultivating a culture where security and compliance are ingrained in every process so compliance feels like a default state, not a last-minute stretch before the audit.   

Take it from the top auditor who has guided numerous businesses through the Styx of non-compliance: 

“Compliance can be fun. The biggest discussion always is that compliance is only a checklist. Yeah, if you make checklists out of it, sure. But if you understand how to analyze risks and what needs to be done from a security perspective, then it is fun because the expert tries to go deeper and understand which controls help mitigate the risk.” – Fabian Weber (vCISO and ISO 27001 auditor) 

TL;DR

• This compliance checklist template outlines the steps and business activities you need to follow to adhere to legal and regulatory compliance guidelines on data security, employment practices, and regional health codes as an organization. 
• All regulatory compliance checklists involve scoping requirements, conducting risk assessments, and implementing controls and compliance guardrails. 

What is a compliance checklist? 

Businesses worldwide must adhere to certain regulations and industry standards to ensure misconduct or security breaches are detected, prevented, or resolved before they cause serious consequences like data leaks, fraud, or legal repercussions. 

The frameworks and applicable regulations that a business must adhere to may vary depending on the industry and the location of its operations and customers.  

For example, if a business in the US in the healthcare industry serves in the EU, then a business must adhere to both, the GDPR and HIPAA regulations. 

Simply, a compliance checklist outlines the procedures you’ll need to follow and guardrails you’ll need to implement to ensure adherence and maintenance of such standards. Thus, inherently,  a part of the compliance checklist needs to scope out risks and implement effective controls to mitigate compliance drift.

Types of compliance and audit checklists

Different industries have different requirements, but, primarily, a compliance audit of a company is performed for the following concerns:

• Infosec regulatory compliance: When a business holds sensitive customer data, it has regulatory obligations to protect that information from leaks and misuse. Infosec compliance audits evaluate an organization’s resilience against such threats. For example, SOC 2, NIST, PCI-DSS, and ISO 27001.  
• Healthcare compliances: Healthcare compliances ensure that businesses like hospitals follow certain guidelines to prevent fraud, ensure data security and privacy of patients, and comply with certain standards of quality of patient care. 
• HR compliances: HR compliance ensures a company follows all the rules for managing employees, from fair hiring practices to workplace safety and fair pay. It’s about making sure the company treats its workers fairly and lawfully.
• Labor law compliance: Staying compliant with labor laws is crucial since it’s one of the most closely watched areas of compliance. Such regulatory audits push businesses to implement guardrails to protect workers’ rights and safety. 

Who is this checklist for? 

If you don’t know where to start, or the steps and the order you need to follow, this checklist will come in handy and ensure a smooth implementation. It walks you through the steps you need to take to jump-start any compliance program and then dives into the specific steps for different frameworks like NIST, SOC 2, HIPAA, and more. Thus, increasing your chances of success in compliance audits, and maintenance of compliance. 

Compliance checklist: A 12-step blueprint to getting compliant.

Achieving compliance is a complex journey involving steps you need to take to adhere to data security and regulatory guidelines. Even though the specific requirements might change as per the industry and landscape of your business, there are some overarching steps that you must follow to comply with any framework. These include conducting thorough risk assessments and implementing controls to mitigate them. Let’s start with the foundation—selecting the right compliance framework:

☑️ Selecting your framework and compliance standard

Different industries and geographies might have specific requirements, such as HIPAA for healthcare, GDPR for upholding data privacy rights of citizens of the EU, SOC 2 for service organizations, ISO/IEC 27001 for information security management, PCI-DSS for businesses that store or process credit card information, CSA-STARR for cloud service providers, and FedRamp for federal agencies.  

You need to scope out your compliance plans to meet organizational goals, industry requirements, compliance obligations, and your organization’s risk management strategies. 

For example, if you’re a business offering cloud services in the U.S but also want to serve citizens of the EU, you might not only need to comply with cybersecurity and infosec compliance standards like ISO/27001 and CSA-STAR but also GDPR to comply with EU specific compliance requirements. 

☑️ Appoint a Chief Compliance Officer

Start by outlining the expectations from the role of a Chief Compliance Officer, and then set up a search committee to look for candidates with the right experience and skills. Interview them thoroughly, check their backgrounds, and then get approval from the compliance team or board. 

☑️ Scoping out requirements

Once you’ve identified the compliance obligations as per your business needs and regulatory requirements, you need to review the documentation and set guidelines for each of these frameworks to gauge the gap between the current state of your organization, and the actions you’ll need to take to get compliant. 

You might ask yourself these questions: 

1) What policies and guidelines have already been implemented? 

2) What changes would these policies need? 

3) Are there any existing gaps in processes or controls?

4) What timelines or deadlines must be met for compliance?

5) What resources (e.g., funds, employees, technology, consultants, auditors) are needed to meet compliance?

☑️ Developing policies and procedures 

Policies are foundational documents that define the protocols and practices within your organization. Different compliance frameworks require different policies and procedures to comply with laws, secure data, ensure its lawful use, and regulate operations under corporate governance protocols. 

Here is a checklist you can use while building your compliance policies: 

☑ Information security policies 

☑ Data-privacy policies

☑ Vendor management policies

☑ Business continuity policies

☑ Work-place safety policy 

☑ Human resource policy

☑️  Employee training 

Once you have established your policies and protocols as per compliance requirements, you need your employees to comply with them. This might require training to ensure they understand the requirements and their duties well. Allocate the budget for training while calculating compliance costs.

☑️ Assign roles and federate accountability

No compliance procedure is complete without ensuring that stakeholders and people do their part to uphold the requirements. A culture of compliance needs to be embedded right in the heart of business operations. As a part of the process, you will need to distribute accountability across various action items, departments, and roles within the organization to promote ownership, transparency, and efficiency in adhering to regulatory requirements.

☑ Identify Key Stakeholders

☑ Define Responsibilities clearly

☑ Assign Accountability

☑️ Identify and Assess risks 

In compliance, business risks entail any activity, actions, or incidents that might violate the set standards and laws of regulatory guidelines. For example, unauthorized access or modification of data, security breaches, and violation of policies.

• List down activities, actions, and incidents that violate the policies and compliance guidelines.  
• Narrow down the risks that apply to your business, geography, and industry.
• List sources of risk and classify them as internal or external. 
• Assess the impact and assign severity levels of incidents as high/medium/low
• Assess and assign the likelihood of occurrence as per defined criteria and assign likelihood levels to each incident as high/medium/low.
• Document the findings 

☑️ Device incident management plan

As per industry practice, your incident management plan should include strategic responses for each risk. You can choose to either completely eliminate risk, reduce its impact, reduce its likelihood of occurrence, transfer, or accept it. 

Once that’s done, you can work with the compliance checklist given below to establish an action plan to manage incidents. Answer:  

• What will you do in the event of an incident?
• What will be the timeline for your actions?
• Who will be held responsible in the event of a breach?
• What resources will you need to deal with it?

Once that’s done, review the plan with stakeholders and document it. 

☑️ Conduct vendor due diligence reviews 

Doing business with a vendor that does not comply with the regulatory requirements and standards might put your compliance audit, licenses, and brand reputation at risk. Thus, reviewing your vendor’s compliance posture becomes necessary to ensure risk mitigation, adherence to regulatory compliance standards, data security, and alignment with business goals.

You might need this checklist to assess vendors on these criteria:

• Compliance posture
• Data Security Practices
• Labor and employment practices 
• Financial performance 
• Business Continuity Plans
• Environmental violations
• Reputational risk

☑️ Establish controls and scope 

Controls in compliance are measures and enforcement actions that an organization must implement to reduce the chances of risks being realized. These controls are a crucial step in your compliance journey, ensuring adherence to policies. These measures can vary from a software check to administrative and physical ones. 

Checklist to implementing compliance controls: 

• Review regulatory requirements 
• Identify risks
• Devise and implement the right preventive and corrective measures to address these risks and regulatory compliance requirements. 

☑️ Test and monitor control performance 

Once you have set up adequate measures to prevent risks and compliance drift, it’s time to ensure they perform as expected. As a business or a private foundation, you’d need to set up mechanisms to continuously monitor controls. With GRC automation tools, it’s easy to automatically test controls, monitor their performance, and collect evidence of compliance. 

• Design effective tests for each control. For example, for access controls, testing checks like 2FA are performing optimally is an effective procedure. 
• Barely ticking off checks won’t cut it, you will need to collect evidence of performance to ensure controls are working as expected. 

☑️ Set up evidence collection workflows or technology

Collecting evidence is essential for a successful audit report. It provides the basis for the auditor’s conclusions and recommendations, demonstrating compliance and transparency across your compliance efforts.

• Determine the type of evidence that needs to be collected
• Review and document logs 
• Take screenshots 
• Store evidence in an organized manner. Ensure you map each piece of evidence to the right controls and frameworks.

☑️ Select a compliance tool

Compliance certifications are crucial milestones of growth for any company. However, building and managing a multi-framework compliance program can get challenging.

To make it even harder, compliance demands copious amounts of manual work. Compliance testing , managing Excel sheets to monitor their performance, and running our individuals and teams to gather evidence – it can cost resources and time. 

A GRC automation tool like Sprinto can help and put your compliance on autopilot. 

You need a tool like Sprinto that comes with pre-mapped controls, pre-built policy templates, and risk benchmarks to get you started on your compliance journey.

On top of it, Sprinto connects everything and everyone — cloud programs, infrastructure, devices, databases, and people — to build a centralized view of assets, risks, and controls. This makes control testing, monitoring, and evidence collection accurate and effortless.

Ambitious tech companies all over the world trust Sprinto to power their security compliance programs and sprint through audits without breaking their stride.

For Infosec, cybersecurity, and IT compliances you’d additionally need this checklist:

• Access and Identity Control: Guidelines for authentication and authorization to ensure people only access the information they are authorized to. 

• Data Sharing Control: Measures for controlling data shared externally, like files stored on third-party servers or attachments sent over email. 
• Incident Response: Directives for handling and responding to data breaches to mitigate and minimize losses. 
• Disaster Recovery: Controls and procedures that ensure quick restoration of backups and operations in the event of a breach.
• Data Loss Prevention: Procedures to prevent data loss and maintain continuity.
• Malware Protection: Use of antivirus and anti-malware tools across all devices.
  

Breeze past any audit with these framework-specific checklists 

HIPAA compliance checklist

HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, is one of the key compliance standards designed to protect the privacy and security of patient information. Here’s a comprehensive HIPAA audit checklist to help your organization conduct necessary compliance activities and ensure it meets all necessary requirements and safeguards patient data effectively.

• Identify the rules that apply to your business 
• Identify measures to protect patient’s data
• Understand the causes of violations 
• Establish controls to prevent violations and breaches 
• Set up monitoring and breach notification system
• Implement technical and physics safeguards 

GDPR compliance audit checklist 

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is crucial for protecting the privacy and security of personal data for individuals in the European Union. Here’s a straightforward GDPR audit checklist outlining key compliance activities to help your organization meet all the necessary requirements and keep personal data safe.

• Implement guidelines for data collection, processing, handling, and storage. 
• Implement mechanisms that ensure subjects’ right to consent, access, modification, rectification, automated decision-making, and restrictions on the use of their data. 
• Always collect consent in a verifiable format and document it. 
• Implement measures to federate and ensure accountability 
• Protect children’s data 

Here’s the full GDPR checklist

ISO27001 compliance audit checklist 

ISO 27001 is an important standard for managing information security and protecting sensitive data. Primarily, the ISO 27001 compliance checklist revolves around creating, testing, and maintaining policies that ensure data protection of an organization’s sensitive assets like customer data from theft and breaches. 

Here’s a practical ISO 27001 checklist to help in your ISO 27001 compliance journey.

• Build a team 
• Define the scope of your ISMS
• Create policies 
• Conduct risk assessment 
• Implement controls to reduce identified risks
• Train team members and foster a culture of security 
• Conduct internal audits and gear up for external ones 

Find the full ISO 27001 compliance checklist here

SOC2 compliance checklist

SOC 2 is another information security standard that lays down foundational principles for handling customer data governing areas like security, integrity, privacy, confidentiality, and processing.  

Here’s a quick SOC 2 compliance checklist: 

• Choose your SOC 2 type report 
• Conduct internal risk assessment 
• Perform gap analysis 
• Implement controls based on that 
• Monitor and remediate controls 
• Collect evidence of controls’ performance 
• Organize evidence and gear up for audits 

Find the full SOC 2 compliance checklist here

OSHA compliance audit checklist 

OSHA compliance checklist talks about general safety and well-being regulations that need to be set in place by the employer to ensure a healthy and safe environment for workers. These might include: 

• Employer and corporate accountability 
• Work safety and healthcare provisions 
• Provision of PPE 
• Provision of fire protection 
• Provision of a work environment free or protected from toxins 
• Provision of safe tools and equipment 

NIST compliance checklist requirements

NIST lays down foundational cybersecurity practices to enable cloud businesses of all sizes to build a baseline resilience against cyber threats like hacking, phishing, and more. It advocates implementing controls and training that enforce authentication and lawful access to data, as well as suggests operating principles like a zero-trust policy. 

Here’s a quick NIST checklist. 

• Identify your controlled classified information. 
• Organize CUIs and data into categories. 
• Conduct a risk assessment 
• Understand baseline control requirements and implement them 
• Implement authentication and access controls 
• Establish a breach response plan 
• Build awareness of security practices and baseline measures 

HR compliance checklist 

• Establishing policies to ensure fair recruiting, interviewing, and hiring practices 
• Establishing rigorous background verification practices 
• Fair classification of the workforce 
• Compliance with local wage laws and tax laws while planning compensation and benefits 
• Establishing policies and controls to ensure diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging 
• Establishing controls to safeguard data privacy and information 
• Complying with fair termination and severance policies as per regional guidelines 
• Establishing clear and fair union agreements 

Time to put theory to action

Congrats! You’re all set to start your compliance journey with the checklists. But there’s more, you need a tool to implement the checklist, set up controls, monitor their performance, and collect evidence. Now imagine a tool that comes with pre-mapped controls to your framework – HIPAA, NIST, ISO 27001, and more – continuously monitors controls and integrates with your systems and clouds to automate evidence collection. That’s Sprinto! 

FAQs

What are the different types of compliances?

Compliance comes in many forms, each vital for keeping businesses in line with laws, regulations, and ethical standards. Here are a few major areas of compliance that businesses adhere to: 

• Infosec compliance 
• Operational compliance 
• Process compliance 
• Healthcare Compliance

What are the checklists for infosec compliance?

Different regulatory compliance frameworks require different checklists. For example, GDPR focuses on aspects of data security and privacy of EU citizens, while NIST focuses on ensuring cloud companies operate in a safe manner. 

Here are the different types of compliance checklists to find. 

• SOC2 Checklist 
• NIST Checklist 
• ISO 27001 Checklist 
• PCI-DSS Checklist

What is the operational compliance checklist?

An operational compliance audit checklist aims to focus on the processes and operations of a business. It includes steps like identifying risks that arise from operations, assessing them for their impact, identifying the framework and regulatory guidelines against those operational risks, and implementing controls and incident response plans to curb the effect of an incident. 

How to create a compliance checklist?

To create a compliance checklist to gear up for an upcoming audit, you need to first identify the frameworks you’re aiming to comply with. Then include steps in your checklist that confirm the enforcement of policies and controls associated with those compliance frameworks, and include checkboxes for collecting evidence for each of these controls. Some frameworks mandate internal risk and control self-assessment so include it as a step in your checklist if the framework mandates it.