Staying ahead of the curve and catching up with everyday evolving digital business world needs is quite challenging. It can affect the overall productivity of the organization, agility, and resilience to different processes. However, continuous compliance can help an organization to beat this heat or meet these challenges smoothly.
Regardless of size and type, all organizations need to work in a compliant manner according to the latest rules or regulations, standards, and policies such as PCI DSS, CMMC, HIPAA, and many others. They also have to comply with the customers’ or suppliers’ requirements and internal policies. It protects investors from fraud or scams.
However, the effectiveness and results depend on what direction or approach you choose to tackle compliance challenges.
Traditional Vs Continuous Compliance
When it comes to choosing between traditional and continuous compliance, most organizations prefer to go with continuous compliance. To understand the reasons behind this selection, we need to look deep into all aspects of both types of compliance.
Traditional Compliance
Traditional compliance is simply a periodic and often manual approach to ensure working in a compliant manner. It usually performs quarterly or annually and focuses on current sessions only.
Key benefits
To better understand the concept of the traditional approach to compliance and its impact on business stability and growth we are going to discuss its major benefits.
- Organizations are well aware of the process and timelines of traditional compliance.
- It provides clear deadlines because compliance checks are already scheduled which creates ease for organizations.
- Another benefit of traditional compliance is well-defined standards.
- In traditional compliance, organizations have a clear idea about what laws or standards they have to comply with.
- Traditional compliance did not involve any additional resource investment.
Drawbacks
- It is reactive and leaves room for non-compliance between assessments.
- Issues can be addressed periodically only.
- Manually handling the stress of the compliance process not only consumes time but also carries risks and security threats.
- It is an expensive approach because it involves multiple audits.
- It also carries the risk of undetected compliance gaps.
Continuous Compliance
Continuous compliance is a dynamic approach to ensuring compliance with industry laws or rules, policies, and taxes regularly. It helps organizations in real-time monitoring, automation, and upgradation of crucial business processes.
Unlike the traditional approach to compliance, it’s a continuous event that demands regular audits and monitoring.
Key Benefits
Continuous compliance is a more productive approach than traditional and brings unlimited benefits and growth opportunities to the organization. Some of its key benefits are listed below;
Proactive: Its major advantage is the early detection of compliance issues and the elimination of heavy fines for non-compliance. Therefore, organizations can take necessary steps to solve these issues at early stages.
Continuous Monitoring: It helps organizations to stay updated through continuous monitoring. It results in the detection of non-compliance and awareness of the latest rules, policies, and standards.
Agility: It allows organizations to adopt changes in regulations and standards which result in more agility in business processes.
Automation: The use of digital tools or software can streamline this process. Continuous compliance automation makes it a more cost-effective approach because it eliminates the risk of expensive mistakes.
Live Documents & Reporting: continuous compliance means an ongoing process. It allows the maintenance of live documents, reports, and accurate artefacts. This feature plays a key role in equipping organizations with everything they need to perform annual compliance.
DevSecOps: maintaining DevOps security is a challenging task and overlooking the security considerations can result in massive security threats, listing sensitive data, and a decline in market reputation fines. Its integration with DevOps compliance ensures DevOps security and provides organizations with best security practices.
Collaboration: continuous compliance is a major source to align different teams or promote close collaboration among stakeholders. It helps organizations to unite different teams working in different ways to a single objective. It reduces time consumption, communication gaps, and financial losses.
Drawbacks
- It needs a learning curve, especially for organizations used to traditional compliance.
- Demands initial resources investment.
Final Verdict
After going through this brief analysis, we conclude that continuous compliance is the ultimate solution to ensure seamless automation, develop organizational policies, and live documentation. For a more hassle-free approach, you can use Kosli, the most credible software to streamline the compliance process.
