The year 2023 was a record-shattering one for cybersecurity. In the U.S. alone, there were 3,205 data breaches. Ten years ago, there were just 614. A surge like this underscores why your business needs to take cybersecurity compliance seriously. Meeting security standards like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and NIST can make doing business so much easier. However, achieving compliance isn’t something you can achieve overnight. We get it. Fortunately, there’s a way to fast-track your compliance without compromising on security.
But first, it helps to know what compliance in cybersecurity is. Organizations are required to adhere to certain laws, standards, and regulations (created by various authorities and agencies) to protect their digital information and systems from cyberattacks. Cybersecurity compliance involves establishing security controls, policies, and procedures that protect and maintain the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive information. There’s a lot that goes into this, clearly, but it’s not as overwhelming as it may sound.
Read on for a clear, strategic approach to achieving compliance quickly and efficiently.
1. Start With a Gap Assessment
Also known as a security gap analysis, a gap assessment is the first step your organization should take to become compliant. It involves analyzing your organization’s security controls and comparing them against the standards you want to meet, such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001. The “gaps” you identify during this process represent the vulnerabilities or threats that malicious attackers can take advantage of to breach your systems. This process also presents opportunities for your organization to improve its cybersecurity compliance framework.
To simplify this process, our (completely free) cyber risk assessment can help with identifying security gaps, particularly for your organization’s web presence. When you sign up for an assessment, we evaluate your website to determine a Cyber Risk Score by determining vulnerabilities, all in under five minutes. This way, you don’t waste resources and effort on areas that aren’t critical.
2. Leverage Expert Help
For smaller organizations, you may not have the right resources to attain compliance on your own (at least, not in a reasonable time frame).
In such cases, partnering with a compliance expert may be your best option. At Trava Security, we can help speed up the process of achieving compliance by up to 75%. We know the exact steps to take, so you can avoid the trial-and-error approach that costs you time.
3. Automate Where Possible
Take advantage of the technology at your disposal to implement your cybersecurity compliance tasks more efficiently. Automation can speed up your compliance-related processes that would otherwise drag on if your team had to handle them manually. Plus, it helps reduce inevitable errors that can occur when humans take on complex tasks, such as monitoring, documentation, and reporting.
Examples of automation tools and technologies your organization can leverage include continuous monitoring solutions, log management platforms, penetration testing tools, vulnerability scanners, and more. If you can dream it, it’s likely you can automate it.
4. Prioritize High-Risk Areas
Not all compliance requirements carry the same level of impact and risk. As such, you’ll need to prioritize. Certain areas — such as data security, access control, and incident response — have greater urgency and are more critical than things like procedural tasks or administrative requirements. It’s best to tackle the most significant vulnerabilities in your system first to expedite the compliance process.
5. Get Your Documentation in Order
You can’t get cybersecurity compliance without documentation. Of course, this part is one of the most time-consuming and labor-intensive processes in compliance. You need to have well-organized and accurate documentation that covers your policies, procedures, audit trails, and a host of other items. If this process isn’t well managed, it can lead to delays in audits and non-compliance.
The best way to achieve efficient documentation is to:
- Centralize your files: Keep everything — all policies, procedures, and compliance-related documents — in a single, easily accessible location. Scattered documentation makes it hard to keep track of your progress, and when needed for audits, it can be quite the headache to round them up.
- Maintain up-to-date records: Regularly review and update documentation to make sure it reflects your current processes and controls. This eliminates the last-minute rush that often occurs when preparing reports for compliance audits.
- Automate documentation management: Take the heavy lifting off your plate. Use tools that help you track and manage compliance documentation efficiently and reduce the administrative burden.
6. Train Your Team
Your cybersecurity policies are only as effective as the team implementing them. Even if you have the best-designed policies, they’ll fall short if your employees don’t know how to apply them.
Good training helps instill in your team the understanding that compliance isn’t just the responsibility of a few people but rather the whole company. It also encourages employees to be more proactive in following security best practices and spotting potential risks.
By the way, training shouldn’t be a one-time project — as the cybersecurity landscape changes (and it will), your employees’ training should keep pace.
7. Perform Regular Internal Audits
Before conducting external assessments for compliance certification, you should first carry out internal audits. These help you catch issues before official auditors find them and delay your certification process. They also act as rehearsals for the actual audits, which usually involve a lot of scrutiny in the form of questions, document reviews, and evaluations of your security controls.
Fast-Track Your Cybersecurity Compliance With Trava
We understand the need to fast-track cybersecurity compliance. The good news is that it’s possible, but don’t fall for the temptation of shortcuts because they’ll eventually catch up with you, one way or another.
Need more guidance to get there? At Trava Security, cybersecurity compliance is our forte. From SOC 2 to ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, and more, we help businesses like yours meet these cybersecurity compliance standards. When you partner with us, we provide the guidance and tools you need to navigate the regulatory requirements and attain certification — in a fraction of the time it’d take to do it yourself.
Interested? Schedule a consultation with one of our experts today.