TL;DR
| A compliance strategy is a roadmap that helps security teams track and accomplish compliance tasks while also enabling them to stay on top of regulatory requirements. |
| A strong strategy should define goals, assign ownership, document policies, train employees, monitor controls, collect evidence, and improve continuously. |
| Compliance strategy and compliance program are related but different: the strategy sets direction, while the program handles day-to-day execution. |
| Teams should measure success through control health, audit readiness, training completion, issue resolution time, vendor risk status, and recurring compliance gaps. |
In Dec 2023, the French authorities slapped a fine of €32 million on Amazon France Logistique for violating multiple GDPR clauses. This isn’t the first time Amazon paid their way out of legal hot water.
While giants like Amazon can afford to continue operations even after violations, small to medium businesses may not recover at all. If you want to avoid a legal mess, a compliance strategy plan should be the first step on your checklist.
What is a compliance strategy?
Compliance strategy is a set of policies and plans to mitigate business risks, adhere to government or industry standards, and prevent security incidents. These strategies evolve with technological advancements, social considerations, and trending risks.
Compliance strategies should be custom-curated to fit the organization’s needs, which may arise from changing technologies, ethical considerations, economic fluctuations, risk trends, and changing regulations.
Compliance strategy vs compliance program
A compliance strategy defines the direction of your compliance efforts. It explains which regulations matter to the business, which risks need priority, how compliance work supports company goals, and what resources are needed to manage obligations over time.
A compliance program is the operating system that puts the strategy into practice. It includes the policies, controls, training, monitoring, reporting workflows, evidence collection, and corrective actions used to meet those obligations day to day.
For example, a SaaS company may decide that its compliance strategy is to prioritize SOC 2 and ISO 27001 because enterprise prospects keep asking for them during procurement. The compliance program would include the access controls, vendor reviews, security training, policy acknowledgments, internal audits, and evidence workflows needed to achieve and maintain those certifications.
The distinction matters because teams often start with program tasks before they have agreed on strategic priorities. That can lead to scattered policies, duplicated evidence work, unclear ownership, and compliance efforts that do not support revenue, risk, or customer trust goals.
Why should you develop a compliance strategy?
Organizations must develop a compliance strategy to adopt a systematic approach to compliance and regulatory requirements and minimize the occurrence of non-compliance. This is necessary for organizations of all sizes but especially holds true for startups looking to become compliant or in industries where laws are introduced or amended regularly.
- It helps Internal functions and compliance teams stay ahead of regulatory compliance obligations, constantly update the policies, and implement new controls.
- It offers clarity on compliance tasks, thereby minimizing redundancy and enhancing operational efficiency
- A well-structured compliance management strategy is also the foundation for streamlining business growth, as it helps employees understand their obligations and make meaningful contributions.
Compliance strategy examples
Compliance strategies should reflect the company’s risk profile, industry, customer expectations, and regulatory obligations. Here are a few examples:
1. Risk-based compliance strategy
A fintech company handling payment data may rank risks by business impact and regulatory exposure. PCI DSS, access controls, fraud monitoring, and incident response would receive more attention than lower-risk administrative processes. This helps the team direct budget and review cycles toward the areas most likely to create financial, legal, or customer harm.
2. Framework-led compliance strategy
A B2B SaaS company selling to enterprise customers may build its strategy around SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, or HIPAA requirements. The goal is not only to pass an audit but also to reduce repeated security questionnaire work, improve buyer confidence, and create a repeatable process for future frameworks.
3. Continuous compliance strategy
A company with frequent product releases, new vendors, and changing cloud infrastructure may focus on continuous control monitoring. Instead of preparing for compliance only before an audit, the team tracks control health, evidence status, access changes, employee training, and vendor risk throughout the year.
4. Centralized compliance strategy
A growing company with multiple departments may centralize compliance ownership under a compliance, security, or GRC function. This helps standardize policies, reduce duplicated work, assign clear accountability, and give leadership a single view of compliance progress.
How to develop a compliance strategy
Your strategy should be specific to the compliance framework you choose, industry, and area of operation. Here are six simple steps to get started with your compliance planning:
Before you begin, agree on three basics: who owns compliance decisions, which obligations matter most, and how progress will be measured. A strong strategy should be risk-based, tied to business goals, and practical enough for teams to follow during normal operations. It should also be reviewed whenever the company enters a new market, adopts a new framework, changes vendors, launches a major product update, or faces a new regulatory requirement.
- Define your goals and objectives
Creating goals is the first step toward ensuring success. This is a crucial piece to your compliance puzzle, as it not only gives the involved parties a good sense of direction but also creates transparency and helps to prioritize activities.
You would want to create OKRs (objective key results), an effective tool that helps you communicate what you want to accomplish and increase accountability.
The objection part is an action-oriented, data-backed measurement of what you are looking to achieve. The key results describe how you want to achieve that within a set timeline and its success rate. Align your goals with the objectives and guidelines of your compliance framework.
As compliance objectives change, you would want to update your goals accordingly. Ideally, every six months or quarterly. - Draft policies and process
Compliance policies are the documented guidelines and procedures of your regulatory obligations and requirements. These serve as proof of your commitment to execute the plan and detail the steps to achieve the compliance strategy targets in a structured way.
Well-written policies enable employees, management, and vendors to know the requirements and get a better grasp of their responsibilities.
The policies should align with your corporate culture and applicable regulations or compliance frameworks like SOC 2 or ISO 27001. Communicate the responsibilities and accountability of each policy to your employees and stakeholders, along with the consequences of non-compliance. Update and review these as often as necessary.
Policies help you launch an effective compliance program and streamline business processes. However, creating these from scratch is cumbersome and error-prone.
We recommend using a ready to use, pre-built library of compliance template policies that cover a wide range of regulatory frameworks and can be customized to fit your requirements. Policy management tools like Sprinto can help you get full control over your documents, evidence, and acknowledgments. - Monitor and track non-compliance
Once your systems and control are up and running, monitoring them for non-compliance, risky behavior, and effectiveness is imperative. This also helps you track how well your compliance strategy meets the regulatory requirements and surface gaps to ensure that you don’t fall out of compliance.
Your compliance monitoring plan should be customized to cater to the type and complexity of the organization and regulatory obligations. It should have detecting, alerting, and remediating capabilities to manage vulnerabilities in real time.
Consider using a compliance monitoring tool to automate the workflows. Sprinto helps you get all round and continuous compliance through a connected and fully automated compliance monitoring program. Build a centralized view of risks, controls, and processes against the requirements of your selected frameworks using intelligent workflows. - Train employees
An effective compliance strategy depends on three components—people, processes, and tools. To ensure the efficiency of the processes and tools, people should be equipped with the right capabilities and knowledge. This is why organizations should invest time and resources to instill a culture of compliance in employees.
Employee training, however, is easier said than done. People tend to resist change or learn new information that is not a part of their daily responsibilities. As an employer, you must develop engaging techniques to ensure that your employees and stakeholders understand their individual obligations.
The training program should be specific to the selected compliance framework and regulations. The program should include new and existing employees, upper management, and even third-party vendors. - Conduct audits and document activities
If you want to collect proof of compliance, documentation is non-negotiable. Every auditor would agree with this philosophy, ‘if it’s not documented, it’s not done.’ So whatever you do, be it implementing new controls, assigning new roles, onboarding new vendors, taking corrective actions, upgrading systems, or conducting compliance risk assessments, maintain an audit trail.
Collecting evidence is a continuous process that can be done manually or automated. The final audit may be conducted internally or via an external audit service provider. External audits are compulsory for frameworks like SOC 2 or ISO 27001 and are more rigorous in nature since there’s no bias factoring in the final report.
Eliminate the fatigue that comes with manual evidence collection. Sprinto automatically and intelligently collects evidence, comprehensively and accurately so you can maintain an audit trail that is easy for auditors to understand. - Continuous monitoring and improvement
Your compliance obligations don’t end at implementing controls or passing audit checks – it is a continuous activity rather than a concentrated one.
Continuous monitoring is a critical process for identifying new gaps, meeting changing regulatory requirements, and addressing new threat challenges. It helps you evaluate the effectiveness of your controls. Addressing gaps as soon as they surface helps you avoid potential scenarios of non-compliance and deter legal penalties.
Standards like ISO 27001 require users to continuously monitor their information security management system (ISMS) in clauses 10.1 – Continual improvement and 10.2 – Nonconformity and corrective action.
Get real-time view of compliance controls with Sprinto
How to measure compliance strategy success
A compliance strategy should create measurable improvements in risk reduction, audit readiness, operational efficiency, and accountability. If you cannot measure these outcomes, it becomes difficult to know whether the strategy is working or only adding more process.
Track metrics such as:
- Control health: Percentage of controls passing, failing, or needing review
- Audit readiness: Evidence completion rate, open audit requests, and time taken to collect evidence
- Issue resolution: Number of compliance gaps found and average time to remediate them
- Training completion: Percentage of employees who complete required compliance and security training on time
- Policy acknowledgment: Percentage of employees and relevant vendors who review and accept required policies
- Access review completion: Number of access reviews completed on schedule and exceptions resolved
- Vendor risk status: Number of high-risk vendors, overdue reviews, and unresolved vendor findings
- Incident and non-compliance trends: Frequency, severity, and recurrence of compliance incidents
- Regulatory change response: Time taken to assess and implement changes after a new obligation is identified
These metrics should be reviewed at a regular cadence by compliance owners and leadership. The goal is to spot weak controls, delayed remediation, missing evidence, or process bottlenecks before they become audit findings or regulatory issues.
Benefits of implementing the right compliance strategy
A compliance strategy promotes accountability in the organization and is crucial for ensuring long-term sustainability of compliance activities. It lays the foundation for governance and contributes to prolonged success of the organization. The following are a few benefits of implementing the right compliance strategy:
Risk minimization
A well-structured strategy minimizes the likelihood of non-compliance, thereby minimizing the potential for repercussions such as fines, penalties, and lawsuits. These ramifications have a cascading effect and also lead to reputational damage and operational risks. A strategy enhances your regulatory readiness and, in turn, solves such problems.
Enhanced public perception
With more businesses working on acquiring global clients and enterprise customers, compliance has become a standard expectation. Having a formalized compliance strategy and program in place demonstrates that you take data protection seriously and enhances your chances of closing the deal.
Financial benefits
The financial benefits come in various forms when it comes to having a compliance strategy. These include costs saved from optimization of resources that are a result of streamlined processes and operational efficiency. Next, the company can save on insurance premiums if it can demonstrate an effective compliance plan.
Improved decisions
The compliance management strategy provides a blueprint for risk management and measuring compliance performance on a regular basis. Regular monitoring and reporting provide a comprehensive view of the compliance status and helps the top management by providing them with clear protocols.
Unlock the power of automation for compliance
Put compliance strategy into action with Sprinto
Struggling to meet compliance requirements? Not sure how to manage the end-to-end process? Without the right tools and processes, managing compliance manually can become chaotic, leaving teams to resolve issues as they occur instead of focusing on the larger picture like critical risks.
Sprinto is a simple and powerful toolkit that helps you manage your compliance efforts and view progress from a single dashboard. Build a comprehensive strategy using a fully automated compliance management machinery.
With Sprinto, your compliance department can manage regulatory issues, continuously monitor controls, identify potential risks, and track progress for external and internal audits effortlessly.
Need more information? Want to talk to a real human? Let our compliance wizards know your requirements and get a free demo.
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Author
Anwita
Anwita is a cybersecurity enthusiast and veteran blogger all rolled into one. Her love for everything cybersecurity started her journey into the world compliance. With multiple certifications on cybersecurity under her belt, she aims to simplify complex security related topics for all audiences. She loves to read nonfiction, listen to progressive rock, and watches sitcoms on the weekends.Go beyond the surface and uncover the governance, risk, and compliance insights that actually matter.
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