Maintaining Regulatory Compliance in a Complex Framework

Businesses have to maintain regulatory compliance with multiple regulations and keep data classification and governance up to par; something which is difficult given the sheer amount of data organizations hold. 53% of companies keep over 1,000 sensitive files accessible to every employee and interconnectivity further complicates the compliance process, with many organizations now using cloud and third-party providers. This is particularly daunting for small and mid-sized organizations that cannot divert revenue and staff away from business operations. Stand-out recent regulations include GDPR and CCPA, but the number of frameworks is constantly increasing. These include PIPEDA, KVKK, India's Personal Data Protection Bill, Brazil’s General Data Privacy Law, Australia’s Notifiable Data Breaches Act, the Personal Data Protection Act in Thailand, and further industry-specific regulations such as HIPAA. Many companies find that they have to comply with multiple frameworks simultaneously, and 10% of US companies are actively working to comply with 50 or more privacy laws. It’s therefore a complex and time-consuming process to identify and meet the requirements of the relevant frameworks. With the consequences becoming more and more severe, not complying to regulations is riskier than ever. In 2019, Google was fined $57 billion for GDPR violations by CNIL, a French data protection agency. In large companies, regulatory compliance is handled by compliance or risk officers, but in small and mid-sized enterprises, this usually falls into the hands of employees who often have no specialist compliance knowledge. All organizations should ensure their networks are safe and compliant, despite the size of their team. This issue is exacerbated by the existing cyber security skills gap, which has left 65% of businesses with a shortage of cyber security staff, and 54% of UK organizations lacking the skills or confidence to carry out basic cyber security tasks such as creating back-ups, managing admin rights, and arranging automatic software updates. The skills gap isn’t the only thing complicating compliance for mid-market organizations; the costs are often extremely high. On average, businesses spend $1.3 million to meet compliance requirements and are expected to put in an additional $1.8 million towards future potential issues. Regulatory requirements in the US cost $10,000 per employee on average, and as compliance is a continuous and evolving process, not a one-off cost, these costs grow with time. Non-compliance fines often cost more than twice the average cost of maintaining compliance and 31% of consumers feel their overall experience with companies has improved since the GDPR was enacted, making complying to regulatory frameworks a vital business cost. With breaches occurring every day, small and mid-sized organizations cannot risk costly fines, lost revenue and the associated reputational damage. It’s important for these businesses to implement a cyber security solution that will enable their compliance efforts, not hinder them. Centripetal understands the importance of maintaining compliance with the right regulatory frameworks. Our cyber threat intelligence solution, CleanINTERNET, continuously identifies threats using dynamic intelligence on a mass scale by leveraging over 3,500 threat intelligence feeds, saving your internal team valuable time for other compliance activities. Our threat analyst team acts as an extension of your security team, using our expertise and delivering comprehensible, actionable findings to you directly. With CleanINTERNET, you can remove the financial burden of implementing complex CTI systems and instead focus your revenue and time on mission-critical business operations. Speak to one of our team about mitigating the risk of non-compliance with Centripetal’s CleanINTERNET threat intelligence solution.

One of the key barriers to compliance for small and mid-sized organizations is the cyber security skills gap. In our next blog, we will discuss alleviating this skills gap by utilising our team of cyber threat analysts.