TLDR
- A corporate compliance program ensures legal adherence and ethical conduct, reduces risks, protects the company’s reputation, and helps to minimize security breaches.
- Some widely recognized and commonly adopted compliance frameworks include SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, NIST CSF, and HIPAA.
- An effective compliance program should not operate as a paper program. It should map legal, regulatory, contractual, and framework obligations to controls, assign clear owners, monitor whether controls work, and keep evidence ready for review.
If you’re considering building a corporate compliance program, it’s likely driven by a few key factors. Perhaps a prospect has requested proof of your company’s ethics and security standards. Maybe regulatory requirements apply based on the services you provide, or you simply want to elevate your organization’s culture, ethics, and security practices.
Whatever the motivation, building a compliance program is no easy task. But before you dive in, it’s essential to grasp the fundamentals: what it takes to create a robust, effective compliance program.
What is a corporate compliance program?
A corporate compliance program is a plan composed of policies, processes, and individuals, that aims to meet regulatory and legal obligations. The purpose of corporate compliance programs is to minimize security breaches, avoid penalties due to noncompliance, ensure ethical behavior, and mitigate operational risks.
“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
DOJ guidance on evaluating corporate compliance programs
For U.S.-facing businesses, the Department of Justice’s Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs is a useful benchmark for checking whether a compliance program is more than a policy binder. Although the guidance is written for prosecutors, the questions it asks are practical for any company reviewing the design and operating discipline of its compliance program.
The DOJ evaluates corporate compliance programs around three core questions:
- Is the program well designed?
- Is the program applied in good faith, adequately resourced, and empowered to function effectively?
- Does the program work in practice?
For businesses, this means a compliance program should not stop at written policies. It should be based on current risk assessments, supported by leadership, communicated through training, tested through monitoring and audits, and updated when the business, regulatory environment, technology stack, or customer commitments change.
A strong compliance program also avoids becoming a “paper program.” It should show how policies translate into working controls, who owns those controls, how failures are detected, how remediation is tracked, and how lessons learned are fed back into risks, policies, and procedures.
The September 2024 DOJ guidance also highlights areas companies should review carefully, including risks posed by new and emerging technologies such as AI, access to compliance data, whistleblower and anti-retaliation protections, third-party management, lessons learned from prior issues, and post-acquisition compliance integration. These are useful checks for any organization that wants its program to hold up under scrutiny from customers, auditors, regulators, or legal counsel.
Why should you develop a corporate compliance program
A corporate compliance program is important because it helps to adhere to legal standards, reduce risks, and prevent security mishaps. It fosters a culture of ethical conduct, protects the organization’s reputation, and helps you:
1. Minimize breaches
Security incidents result in financial loss, business downtimes, leakage of sensitive data, and loss of reputation.
When you adopt a regulatory framework designed to strengthen your security posture, it adds resilience to the defense capabilities. This approach ensures that systems not only minimize the likelihood of incidents but also mitigate the damage from any breaches that occur.
2. Avoid penalties
Noncompliance can result in two types of penalties.
The first includes legal penalties. If compulsory regulations like PCI DSS, HIPAA, or GDPR are applicable to your business, noncompliance or a breach incident can result in penalties – the range of which depends on the severity of the breach.
The second type is a consequence – when you don’t comply with industry standards and best practices, the resilience of the infrastructure takes a hit. Poor resilience opens up a pandora’s box of vulnerabilities, which is the ticking bomb for security breaches. According to a study conducted by Ponemon Institute, the cost of a data breach is increasing every year.
3. To earn trust
This is more of an indirect impact that can hit your goals in the long term. If you offer a service that processes sensitive customer data, prospects are likely to ask you to demonstrate proof that they are partnering with a business that is capable of handling their data without compromises.
When you comply with an industry-accepted standard that is globally recognized, it helps your sales team close deals faster and quickly onboard customers. Noncompliance gives your prospects the opportunity to partner with a competitor.
Common compliance frameworks explained
Compliance programs are unique to each organization and depend on factors like risk profile, primary location of operation, type of service, data processes, and more. Here are some common compliance frameworks that offer best practices and guidance to build a program:
| Compliance framework | Who is it for | Framework structure | Certification/compliance process |
| SOC 2 | Service providers, especially SaaS companies handling sensitive customer data who want to demonstrate strong security practices to new prospects. | Secures data based on five Trust Service Criteria (TSC) or principles; security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. These five principles are further divided into 64 requirements. Businesses have to implement security measures to meet these requirements. | Define scope by identifying the applicable TSCs Identify the scope of the report (Type 1 or 2) Conduct an internal assessment Conduct a gap analysis and remediate based on the results Implement controls and evaluate their effectiveness Undergo readiness assessment Get a certified auditor to assess your posture and generate a report |
| ISO 27001 | Businesses of all sizes that want to establish or improve their ISMS (information security management system). | ISO/IEC 27001:2022 defines requirements for establishing, implementing, maintaining, and continually improving an ISMS. Annex A provides a reference set of information security controls that organizations select based on risk, applicability, and business context. | The process typically involves defining the ISMS scope, conducting a risk assessment, creating a risk treatment plan, implementing controls, running internal audits and management reviews, completing remediation, and undergoing a certification audit by an accredited certification body. |
| GDPR | Businesses that process personal data of EU residents, regardless of where the business is located. | GDPR sets obligations around lawful basis, transparency, data subject rights, processor management, breach notification, international transfers, and security of processing. | The process typically involves mapping personal data flows, identifying lawful bases, maintaining records of processing activities, updating privacy notices, establishing data subject request workflows, reviewing processor agreements, training employees, and implementing technical and organizational safeguards. GDPR certification may be available through approved certification mechanisms for specific processing activities, but it should not be treated as a single universal certification equivalent to ISO 27001. |
| HIPAA | Covered entities in the healthcare sector include healthcare providers, insurers, and business associates who process, store, or handle protected health information (PHI). | The act consists of five titles, out of which the second title (Administrative Simplification) details the compliance requirements for BAs and CEs. It has five rules: Privacy ruleSecurity ruleTransactions and Code Sets ruleUnique Identifiers ruleEnforcement rule | There is no such thing as a HIPAA certification recognized by the enforcing body (HHS). However, businesses can get their systems and practices audited by third-party services. The process involves: Select and security and privacy officer Establish privacy policies and security procedures to protect PHI Create a Business Associate Agreement with vendors Train your employees Conduct risk assessment Develop a breach notification protocol |
Seven elements of an effective compliance program
To create a robust compliance program, the following seven elements should be in place:
- Written standards, policies, and procedures that define legal, ethical, security, and operational expectations.
- Clear governance, oversight, and control ownership, including who maintains the program and who owns each control.
- Risk-based controls that are tied to applicable laws, regulations, frameworks, customer contracts, systems, data, and business processes.
- Training, communication, and reporting channels so employees, vendors, and stakeholders understand their responsibilities and can raise concerns.
- Monitoring, auditing, and control testing to identify gaps, detect drift, and confirm that controls are working as intended.
- Consistent enforcement, investigation, and corrective action when policies are violated or controls fail.
- Continuous improvement through root cause analysis, remediation, and updates based on incidents, audit findings, risk changes, and lessons learned.
How to develop and monitor the compliance program
A robust compliance program should have custom policies, be audited internally, have an employee training program, and have the right controls in place.
Let’s understand them in detail:
- Policies
To implement an effective compliance program, you must develop guardrails around the operations. Compliance policies are documents detailing how individuals interact with systems and assets. It is a high-level reflection of your company’s values, and ethics, and aligned with the goals. Policies should have a buy-in from all internal and external stakeholders.
- Internal audits
The goal of developing a compliance program is to meet the legal requirements and practices mandated by the framework. Given the scope and complexity of such a project, understanding if all the moving parts are progressing in a manner that meets these mandates.
An internal audit helps infosec teams understand the current posture, how far it falls behind, and identify gaps. Include monitoring logs, timestamps, system screenshots, and other critical records in your audit trail. - Risk assessment
As businesses adopt new systems, enter new markets, use new technologies, add vendors, and hire more people, their risk profiles change. A risk assessment helps you identify where the compliance program is most exposed and where controls need strengthening.
Start by mapping the obligations that apply to your business. These may come from laws, regulations, compliance frameworks, customer contracts, vendor agreements, internal policies, or security commitments made during sales and procurement. Then map the systems, data types, vendors, teams, and business processes connected to those obligations.
A useful risk assessment should answer:
1. What obligations apply to the business?
2. What assets, systems, data, vendors, and teams are in scope?
3. Where could non-compliance, control failure, fraud, security gaps, or operational breakdowns occur?
4. What controls already exist?
5. Who owns those controls?
6. How are those controls monitored and tested?
7. Which risks should be accepted, avoided, transferred, or mitigated?
Risk assessments should not be one-time exercises. Review them when the business launches a new product, enters a new region, adopts AI or another emerging technology, changes vendors, completes an acquisition, identifies a control failure, or receives new customer or regulatory requirements. This keeps the compliance program tied to current business realities rather than yesterday’s assumptions. - Employee training
Humans are the touchpoints that connect risk-inducing action and the technology used to introduce it. This is why it is critical for employees to familiarize themselves with the best practices and work efficiently without breaking down the security guardrails.
Develop your training program based on your security goals, history of breaches, and compliance requirements. All new employees and vendors who have access to critical assets should undergo the training as part of their onboarding process. For existing employees, the frequency should be at least once every six months. - Continuous monitoring
Audits show your compliance posture at a point in time. Continuous monitoring shows whether key controls are working between audits. This matters because compliance gaps rarely appear all at once. They build up when cloud assets change, access permissions drift, employees change roles, vendors are added, policies become outdated, or evidence is not collected on time.
A continuous monitoring system should include:
1. Real-time or scheduled checks across systems, assets, users, vendors, and workflows
2. Alerts that notify the right owner when a control fails or when evidence is missing
3. Automated compliance checks that enforce policies or trigger corrective action
4. Periodic control testing to confirm that controls still work as intended
5. Exception tracking for risk acceptance, compensating controls, and remediation plans
6. Evidence collection that proves policies, controls, approvals, and remediation steps were followed
7. Review cadences to ensure risks, controls, and policies stay aligned with business changes
Continuous monitoring does not mean a compliance program will never have gaps. Mature programs still detect exceptions. The difference is that gaps are identified early, routed to the right owner, remediated on time, and documented with an audit-ready trail. - Implement controls
These are the strategies, systems, measures, and mechanisms. These work together to minimize the impact of breaches or prevent them from occurring in the first place by acting as a guardrail that adds a layer of protection against risky or fraudulent activities.
Controls fall within either one of the three categories:
1. Preventive (designed to avert risky issues)
2. Detective (identifies issues after they have already entered the system
3. Corrective (rectify and control the damages).
Compliance controls should be selected and designed based on three objectives:
1. Results of a risk assessment
2. Requirements of the applicable framework
3. Your organization’s unique security goals. - Assign roles and responsibilities
Taking a corporate compliance program to the finish line involves multiple teams. Compliance may coordinate the program, but the actual controls often sit with HR, IT, engineering, product, finance, legal, sales, support, and operations. That is why every control should have a clear owner. A control owner is responsible for ensuring the control operates as expected, that evidence is available, that exceptions are addressed, and that remediation is completed when something fails.
For each control, define:
1. The control owner
2. The business or technical system in scope
3. The evidence source
4. The review or testing cadence
5. The expected outcome
6. What counts as a failure
7. The escalation path
8. The remediation timeline
9. Any compensating controls
10. The person or team responsible for the final review
This prevents compliance from becoming a last-minute scramble where the GRC team chases screenshots, approvals, access reviews, and policy acknowledgments across the company. It also creates accountability across the teams that actually operate the controls. - Collect evidence
Evidence is proof that your compliance program is operating as intended. It shows auditors, customers, regulators, and internal leaders that policies are not just written down, but followed in practice. Good evidence should be fresh, attributable, time-stamped, and mapped to the control it supports. It should also show the full trail: what was checked, who approved it, when it happened, what exceptions were found, and how those exceptions were handled.
Evidence may include:
1. System-generated logs and reports
2. Access review exports and approvals
3. Change management tickets
4. Risk assessment results
5. Policy review and approval history
6. Employee training records and acknowledgments
7. Vendor due diligence records
8. Incident response tests or tabletop outputs
9. Screenshots, where system-generated evidence is not available
10. Remediation tickets and closure notes
Manual evidence collection can work for a single audit or a small program. But as the organization adds more frameworks, teams, vendors, systems, and audit periods, spreadsheets and screenshots become difficult to maintain. A better approach is to collect evidence from the systems where controls operate, map it to the appropriate requirement, and review exceptions before the audit window arrives.
How Sprinto helps you establish and maintain a continuous corporate compliance program
A corporate compliance program has too many moving parts to manage reliably in scattered spreadsheets, especially once you have multiple frameworks, vendors, teams, systems, and audit periods in scope.
Sprinto helps teams move from one-time audit preparation to continuous compliance operations. It centralizes frameworks, controls, risks, policies, tasks, and evidence so you can see what is in scope, who owns each activity, and where gaps need attention.
Sprinto connects with your cloud, HRIS, identity, code, device, and business systems to monitor controls, flag gaps, assign remediation, and keep evidence current. This helps GRC and security teams reduce last-minute evidence chasing and gives leaders a clearer view of which controls are working, which ones are failing, and who owns the next step.
For control owners across HR, engineering, IT, legal, finance, and operations, Sprinto turns compliance responsibilities into clear tasks instead of ad hoc requests before an audit.
If your program is expanding from a single framework to multiple obligations, Sprinto helps keep it scalable, auditable, and aligned with how your business operates.
Want to learn more? Talk to a compliance expert now
FAQs
A corporate compliance plan has the following elements: clear policies, a compliance officer, an employee training program, effective communication, monitoring activities, prompt resolution of issues, and continuous tracking and improvement.
To choose an IT compliance tool, start by identifying the compliance frameworks relevant to your organization, ensuring the tool supports them, testing the platform’s usability through demos, looking for automated workflows, integration with existing systems, reporting capabilities, and scalability to grow with your needs.
An example of a compliance program in healthcare is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). It requires healthcare workers and service providers to protect personal health information of patients from being leaked or disclosed to unauthorized individuals.
In large organizations, The Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) oversees the compliance program, ensuring adherence to legal and ethical standards. The CCO coordinates with the compliance committee and other leaders to manage risks. In smaller companies, compliance activities are distributed among employees.
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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