As CEO of your company, you’ve worked hard to grow the business and ensure success. But there can be a roadblock to future growth of your organization—lack of compliance. This can have several negative effects on a company including loss of customers, fines and a lack of trust among current customers or prospects.

Effective compliance and risk management goes far beyond a set of policies. To be effective, a company’s compliance and risk management program must be embedded in its culture. All too often, companies see compliance as a separate activity that does not need to be integrated into the day-to-day business operations. All employees should share responsibility, and an intelligent risk framework should be created that brings compliance out in the open — letting employees know the importance of compliance while allowing them to communicate. But that’s often easier said than done.

The more advanced technology gets, the more chief information security officers have to worry about. And with hackers waging significant wars on major organizations like JPMorgan Chase and Anthem, their job has become more important than ever.

The ultimate goal of a compliance program is not only to make sure your organization meets the requirements for compliance, but to also ensure employees do the right thing. But it can be difficult to determine the success of your organization’s compliance. What do you measure? How often do you measure? What do you focus on?

NOTE: Schellman has since updated and expanded on this information in an article here. Nobody likes a compliance audit, but they serve a necessary purpose in the business world. If an organization is lacking in its adherence to global compliance regulations, there could be serious fallout. Employees or customers may lose trust. Your company’s reputation could be damaged, and worse — lawsuits and fines can significantly damage financial health. For this reason, chief compliance officers must change the way they think about audits. Painstaking as they may be, an audit provides you the opportunity to rectify issues before they become larger problems. Instead of dreading and avoiding an upcoming audit, here’s how compliance leaders can prepare their company to make the review process less agonizing.

Organizations take different approaches when it comes to documenting their policies and procedures. Some prioritize keeping them well-documented and easily accessible to employees at all times. Others may only recognize their importance when planning and preparing for an audit as they conduct an extensive review of their existing documentation to determine if they meet audit guideline requirements. Meanwhile, there are companies that overlook or neglect the need for formal policies and procedure documentation altogether.

Although undergoing a SOC 2 examination is not a mandatory security framework and as such, is not a legal or regulatory requirement for every business, it is often considered a necessity for companies. This is especially true for organizations that regularly store customer data and handle sensitive information.

Undoubtedly, the ISO 27001 Certification is recognized globally and revered as one of the highest and most comprehensive certifications an organization can attain. The high esteem that the certification is held is substantiated by the effort and dedication that is required by an organization to attain ISO 27001 certification. As an internationally accepted certification, ISO 27001 represents an organization's ability to effectively manage information security risks with a certified information security management system (ISMS).