How to Maximize the Value of Your Compliance

In an increasingly complex world that’s more reliant on interconnected information systems, meeting the challenge to achieve compliance with security standards may take a backseat to your striving for sustainable growth. But in fact, compliance initiatives can play a bigger role in that growth than you might assume—you just have to maximize your return on that investment.

For many organizations, it can be tempting to restrict compliance-related investment, allocating minimal resources and limited controls to meet the requirements necessary to satisfy a minimal bar set by a low-cost provider’s assessment—a route that has its risks.

As providers of cybersecurity assessments for over 20 years, we’re very aware of the constraints everyone faces when supporting varying priorities, just as we’re aware of how low on the priority scale compliance can fall.

But in this article, we’ll explain why building a compliance program should be considered an investment rather than an expense, as well as how a robust effort in establishing and maintaining one can benefit your organization beyond the security reassurances to customers.

Compliance as an Investment—Not an Expense

We know better than most that the cost of satisfying a compliance audit or a certification effort is often considered exactly that—an expense. Especially since it’s not just about the one-time assessment fees, as it’s also about:

• The infrastructure and processes you’ll have to stand up to become fully compliant in the first place; and
• Committing resources to the ongoing monitoring and maintenance of compliant systems.

This mindset isn’t entirely unfounded—you are going to spend a certain amount of money and time to achieve compliance. And while the transactional approach of just getting through one requested assessment may be a good way to initiate compliance efforts, there are benefits to viewing this aspect of your business as more of an investment—as in, something that can yield greater returns with a greater investment. 

3 Ways Compliance Can Further Benefit Your Organization

Of course, to get any kind of backing, you’re likely going to have to convince your CFO and other leadership to greenlight the resources, so here are three advantages you can glean from a comprehensive compliance effort that extend beyond simply reassuring your customers that their data is safe.

1. Gain a Market Differentiator

Though your current clients may be the ones requesting these initiatives, attracting new business partners will require trust, and in today’s business landscape, your commitment to compliance can serve as a significant market differentiator.

Compliance achievements—be it an attestation report or certification against a standard, offer your organization an avenue to communicate this commitment—can be used to build trust, amplify your reputation, and ultimately thrive and grow within your market.

Your customers have a brand they want to protect—to let them know you’re capable of protecting it, you can and should advertise your compliance in different ways:

2. Save Time on Vendor Questionnaires

But it’s not just about acquiring new business—compliance can help streamline your vendor selection and management.

While these are crucial processes when outsourcing your supply chain, when we work with service organizations, we often hear how vendor questionnaires are the bane of their existence. Properly completing these is no small task—questionnaires can be 100+ questions and the questions are only growing in number.

A well-structured compliance program can be your ace in the hole—providing compliance reports/certificates to customers should drastically reduce the number of questions you’ll need to answer.

If you find an assessor capable of performing integrated audits, you'll be able to knock out multiple compliance initiatives in one fell swoop, which will allow you to structure your compliance programs so that you audit once but answer many more questions. (If you consider the compliance space as a giant Venn diagram, it can make sense to engage a provider who knows how to take advantage of the overlap.)

3. Leverage Expert Knowledge

Though audits have specific goals and outcomes, there’s knowledge to be gained in the process if you cultivate the relationship with your assessor beyond the delivery of a compliance or certification report.

Audit teams will be comprised of subject matter experts and personnel with years of learning the nuts and bolts of a variety of business and IT environments, and you should take advantage of their experience and expertise to get—at the very least—tailored recommendations on how you can improve.

If you’re investing in compliance, you should tap into this available knowledge wherever possible, as auditors can provide knowledge regarding:

• How your organization’s controls compare to industry benchmarks
• How similar organizations are meeting standard requirements or mitigating risks
• Industry best practices
• Technology trends/updates
• Trends around vulnerabilities and risks to service providers

How to Get Started Maximizing Your Return on Compliance Investment

Maximizing these advantages will take more than just a bigger budget and time spent on compliance—you’ll need to take some other steps internally to ensure your organization benefits optimally from your compliance initiatives.

Forge/Enhance the Relationship Between Your Security and Sales Teams

Despite their vastly different mandates, compliance ties these teams more closely than you think: if your compliance team is delivering adherence to security standards, the sales team needs to communicate that to your future prospects, and the only way they can do that appropriately is if those two teams have a relationship.

It’s not just a one-way road, either—your sales team can relay back what they’re hearing from would-be customers about what they need and what the market is trending towards so that other compliance solutions can be explored.

Choose a Capable Assessor

Choosing a competent assessor is your first priority—should you receive a report of questionable quality, you might get pushback from customers. Worse, if something was missed, you might even have to redo the assessment entirely, and that would mean more time and money spent—in this case, a true expense—not to mention the damage done to customers’ trust in you when they realize you didn’t take proper care with their compliance requests.

Assessors are not created equal—you’ll be in partnership with the firm you choose, so make sure you do your due diligence to ensure they deliver what you need the first time.

Don’t Approach Compliance as Piecemeal.

If you’re getting into compliance due to a specific customer request, don’t just plan for just that engagement because it’ll get more expensive quickly—in more ways than one.

We already discussed the advantages of a versatile assessment firm, and while that’ll help you save in costs and administrative work, so will thinking more proactively internally. Creating a comprehensive compliance program with a baseline set of controls that are deployed across your organization and can meet the various requirements will further lessen the burden on you in the future and further maximize your investment.

Want to Learn More?

It’s easy to relegate efforts to achieve compliance to time and money not being spent on your business growth plans. But in fact, these initiatives—when maximized—can serve to expand your business, streamline processes, and improve your cybersecurity knowledge base.

Now that you understand more about how to get started in boosting your returns from your commitments to security standards and why you should, you may be looking for that aforementioned “capable assessor”—Schellman compares well with our direct competitors, but if you’re interested in learning more about how we can best serve your organization specifically, contact us today