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Generally, with new cybersecurity regulations, organizations affected are provided a “grace period” to make the necessary adjustments to achieve full compliance before enforcement begins. Looking toward the horizon and 2025, many new laws will be coming into full effect, which means organizations will now likely be subject to various penalties if they’re not ready and haven’t satisfied all relevant requirements.

Whether you’ve already completed your first audit or you’re planning your compliance calendar for the new year, you know that compliance is more than a bullet point on a strategy slide deck—it’s a serious investment and a process that will recur year-over-year, so you can’t drop the ball in between assessments, especially amidst an ever-evolving cyberthreat landscape. To help your organization remain safeguarded between your audit cycles, you should seek to strengthen and streamline your compliance—the good news is, there are ways to do that.

GettiWhen you commit to getting ISO 9001 certified, you commit to meeting the needs of customers and other stakeholders regarding your product or service through a comprehensive quality management system (QMS). But it’s not enough to meet the standard—you have to get ISO 9001 certified, which involves an initial certification audit, further surveillance audits, and recertification in order to maintain an accredited certification.

When seeking ISO 9001 certification, part of that road to compliance will be aligning your required quality management system (QMS) with the key clauses (4-10) within the standard, each of which focuses on a specific facet of that management system—context, leadership, planning, support, operation, performance evaluation, and improvement.

Auditors. We’re an odd breed. “A necessary pain in the tuchus,” some may say. Admittedly, we’re not everyone’s cup of tea. In fact, in our 20+ years of experience, we’ve seen the word “auditor” invite various visceral responses. To be sure, organizations aren’t always enthusiastic about inviting us assessors in to do the requisite checks, despite the benefits of doing so (and despite being invited guests).

"Even when clouds grow thick, the sun still pours its light earthward."

If you’ve ever skied before, you might know that anything can happen on a mountain. It might be your first time on the slopes or you might have traversed a certain run hundreds of times, but all it takes is a little loose powder, a wayward stick, or even another skier in your way to have you eating snow and nursing bruises.

If you’re a parent, you’ve likely had the debate in the car with your young kids—they want to stop for McDonalds and you tell them, “we’ve got food at home.” From their perspective, they want what they want, but from yours, you understand you’ve already made an investment in perfectly good food at the grocery store, and you’re not about to spend any more money that you don’t have to.