How to Build a Compliance Strategy in 6 Steps

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. 

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.

To develop your compliance strategy you must define your goals, draft policies, track areas of non-compliance, train employees, conduct internal audits and continuously monitor for improvements

Compliance automation tools can help you put your compliance strategy into action by providing streamlined workflows, policy and training help, automating evidence collection and automating a range of tasks

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. 

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.

How to develop a compliance strategy

Your strategy should be specific to the compliance framework you choose, industry, and area of operation. Here are five simple steps to get started with your compliance planning: 

1. Define your goals and objectives

Creating goals is the first step towards 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.

2. 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 stakeholder, 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. Know how. 

3. 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. Learn more.

4. 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.

5. 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 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. Know how.

6. 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 to identify new gaps, meet changing regulatory requirements, and address new threat challenges. It helps you evaluate the effectiveness of your controls. When you address gaps as soon as they surface, it 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. Learn how to continuously monitor compliance in five steps. 

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 mnimizing 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.

3 tools that can help you automate compliance

Compliance automation tools can help you kickstart the activities laid out in the strategy with ease. They can streamline compliance workflows and do all the heavy lifting for your organization.

Let’s look at 3 tools that can help you automate compliance:

Sprinto

Sprinto is a compliance automation tool that uses adaptive automation capabilities to help you minimize manual inputs while maximizing output. It is a preferred choice of cloud-first companies and is built for flexibility, scalability and maintainability. Sprinto supports 20+ frameworks and helps you get audit ready in weeks instead of months.

Key Features:

• Integrated risk management: Sprinto has integrated risk management that helps you identify, score, and mitigate risks for all-round protection
• Policy templates and distribution support: It has in-built policy templates to help you save time and ensures org-wide distribution and acknowledgments
• In-built training modules: The product features security and compliance training modules and helps you track completion
• Continuous monitoring: 200+ native integrations and responsive APIs ensure granular level monitoring of controls
• Vulnerability and incident management: It integrates with vulnerability and incident management tools to raise alerts and helps you track them till closure
• Automated evidence collection: Sprinto automatically collects evidence in an audit-friendly manner to make your audits a breeze
• Role-based access controls: The platform supports role-based access controls and automates access reviews for critical systems
• Vendor management: It helps you manage the vendor ecosystem from a centralized place and monitor high-risk vendors
• Complementary trust center: Sprinto enables you to demonstrate your live compliance status using trust center pages

Secureframe

Secureframe is a compliance automation platform that helps you streamline your compliance journey for several frameworks. With it’s AI-powered capabilities it enables you to spend less time on compliance tasks and accelerate the audit-readiness process.

Key Features

• Risk management: The platform features comprehensive risk assessments and enables end-to-end risk management
• Integrations: It supports 200+ integrations with cloud providers, HRIS, SSO providers, and more for data collection and monitoring
• Vendor management: Secureframe helps you manage vendors with centralized vendor profiles and gives a quick snapshot of third-party risks
• Personnel management: The platform facilitates automated onboarding and offboarding of employees, sends reminders for training and other tasks and tracks access levels for employees
• Automated evidence collection: It automatically captures evidence for audit purposes

Vanta

Vanta is an automation-first compliance tool that enables SaaS companies to manage risks, security, and compliance. It is a responsive and easy-to-use platform that is suitable for organizations of all sizes

Key Features

• Risk assessments: Vanta features a risk library and automates risk assessments to simplify risk management
• Policy management: It features pre-built security policies and makes it easy for employees to read and accept them
• Automated tests: It runs automated tests, monitors controls, and give you a real-time view continuously
• Security questionnaires: Vanta automates the process of filling security questionnaires with AI capabilities
• Workspaces: It lets you create dedicated workspaces for different business units and manage compliance accordingly

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.

FAQs

What are the 3 main pillars of compliance?

People, processes and technology are the 3 main pillars of compliance. It begins with defining the responsibilities of people involved in compliance tasks and training them. This is followed by implementing processes and technical controls to achieve and maintain compliance.

What are the 3 elements of a strategy for maintaining compliance?

The 3 elements of a compliance strategy that help organizations continuously maintain compliance are risk assessments, continuous monitoring and reporting. Risk assessments paired with continuous monitoring help identify persistent risks and gaps. The reports help evaluate the effectiveness of the program and make ongoing improvements.

What are the goals of a regulatory compliance strategy?

The goals of implementing a strategy is to reduce compliance risks, meet compliance obligations, streamline internal processes, ensure employee awareness, and reduce non-compliance issues. 

What are the elements of a corporate compliance process?

Ideally, your corporate compliance strategies and processes should include a legal team to oversee relevant regulations, monitoring systems, evidence collecting solutions, training sessions for employees and business partners, and audits to reduce regulatory risks.