If you’re a risk management professional or compliance officer, we don’t need to tell you how often the regulatory environment changes. At its worst, trying to comply with an ever-shifting set of laws, regulations and frameworks is difficult to maintain and scale effectively. That’s doubly true if you work in a highly regulated industry, such as security, government services or healthcare.
So how do you reduce the complexity of managing multiple privacy frameworks without introducing new risks in the process? The key to meeting the compliance challenge is to replace time-consuming and error-prone manual processes with more efficient centralized solutions. With the right software, your compliance management team can shift their focus from catching up on regulatory updates to predicting and mitigating potential future risks.
Key Takeaways
- The compliance challenge grows as regulations change, especially in highly regulated industries like healthcare and finance.
- Businesses face difficulties complying with overlapping regulations across multiple jurisdictions, leading to a complex compliance landscape.
- Manual processes create silos that hinder real-time tracking and increase risks within compliance management.
- Centralizing compliance management with a GRC platform simplifies oversight and automates regulatory updates, reducing manual work.
- Automated GRC software enhances preparedness for audits and helps anticipate risks, thereby addressing the compliance challenge effectively.
Table of Contents
How Regulatory Requirements Pile Up
Compliance is increasingly complex across industries and domains, and the challenges multiply as regulations proliferate. If any of these problems sound familiar to you or your business, read on for our expert recommendations on overcoming many of the hurdles of regulatory change management.
Operating Across Multiple Jurisdictions
One of the most obvious compliance challenges arises when your business operates in multiple states, countries or even continents, exposing your organization to varying sets of regulations that may overlap or sometimes even conflict. For example, a data management service based in California with customers in Portugal and Brazil would be subject to multiple privacy regulations, including the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Brazilian General Data Protection Law, or Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados (LGPD).
Working in Highly Regulated Markets
Regardless of your organization’s geographic location, you can still be affected by a layered and often overlapping set of regulations if you work in an industry that is highly regulated to prevent real harm, such as finance, governance or the healthcare industry.
Take finance, for example. If your organization facilitates transactions across multiple jurisdictions, you need to not only comply with data privacy laws that impact sensitive banking information, but also keep up with the constantly updating anti-money laundering regulations in each of your jurisdictions.
Keeping Up with Frequent Regulatory Changes
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of compliance is that once you’ve set up your business in accordance with all the relevant geographic or industry-based regulations, it’s only a matter of time until those laws change. Then you’ll need to start the process all over again.
With all of these challenges mounting, how do compliance officers handle the complex and essential work of staying on top of shifting regulations and ensuring business operations never deviate from them across the supply chain? In too many cases, the answer is an ad hoc program held together by institutional knowledge, unspoken expectations and tedious, repetitive work.
Learn more: All About Regulatory Change Management
Why Manual Approaches Aren’t Enough Anymore
With the many complicating factors in regulatory compliance, many organizations find that their current solutions may not be adequate. For many risk management teams, the burden of dealing with regulatory uncertainty falls on a few overtaxed workflows, individuals or teams. Compliance processes too often end up siloed and shrouded in mystery, even though legal risks and adverse effects have the potential to impact the entire organization.
Silos Create or Inflate Risks
When risk management teams work in their own dedicated software or workflows without much interaction with the larger organization, it’s easy for important information such as potential risks to go unreported to the higher levels of management that have the power to implement sweeping solutions. Instead, individual risk managers employ temporary solutions that only end up kicking the proverbial can down the road, sometimes introducing new risks in the process.
Undocumented Knowledge Becomes a Liability
In many organizations, a few highly experienced compliance managers become human libraries of the processes for understanding and incorporating regulatory updates into the risk management frameworks. That means things only work smoothly as long as those individuals are at the helm. But once they leave the organization, switch roles or even just take a vacation, massive gaps in the process can pop up seemingly overnight with no one equipped to fill them.
Manual Processes Prevent Real-Time Tracking
If a security compliance program consists of a handful of isolated individuals or manual processes, it becomes nearly impossible to move quickly, understand where various compliance efforts stand and avoid repeating work across teams.
What’s more, this lack of visibility prevents the senior leadership at the company from comprehending the scale and importance of regulatory management efforts. That means it takes even longer for compliance teams to get the support and resources they need, if at all.
Learn more: Why Regulatory Change Management Is Breaking Down and How To Fix It
How to Centralize Your Compliance Management
Fortunately, many of the most serious challenges in compliance can be addressed with a single, elegant solution: a comprehensive governance, risk and compliance (GRC) platform. The right tool can replace numerous manual workflows, support audit readiness through automated evidence collection and even track regulatory updates and inform the right individuals.
These are a few of the main benefits of using centralized software to automate your regulatory management framework:
- Bird’s-eye view of compliance efforts: A GRC platform accessible across your organization can simplify work in multiple domains. Time spent answering questions and producing reports becomes time saved when anyone on your team can easily reference vital information such as framework requirements and task statuses. This information can also help you prove the efficacy of your work to leadership with the power to redirect resources appropriately.
- Automated continuous monitoring: GRC software with added artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities can be transformative for your compliance program. Onspring’s compliance management software maps your existing policies to relevant regulations, automatically tracks compliance, and recommends the right team member to handle any task it suggests. That means less manual work for your team, plus a reduced risk of natural human errors that can lead to major problems down the road.
- Audit readiness: Centralized compliance software can’t prevent every unwelcome outcome, but it can keep you better prepared to handle the fallout. When an adverse event like a data breach does happen, the right platform can help you quantify your losses, pinpoint potential causes and prove your due diligence to the relevant authorities.
Learn more: How AI Helps GRC Teams Respond to Regulatory Change Faster
Conquer the Compliance Challenge with Centralized GRC Software
Even in the most tightly regulated industries, understanding and enforcing compliance efforts across your organization doesn’t have to be a headache. You can replace hours of manual, error-prone labor with easy-to-use yet powerful software.
Stop chasing after regulatory updates and start proactively anticipating and mitigating risks. The uses of automated GRC software extend beyond compliance to support all kinds of risk management functions, from data privacy to third-party risk management.
Ready to build a more scalable and defensible compliance framework? Download the free Onspring eBook Data Lifecycle Management: From Collection to Deletion.
