Compliance Frameworks offer a structured roadmap for meeting regulatory requirements. They break complex compliance obligations down into manageable steps, ensuring all necessary requirements are met.
They also promote efficiency by providing a standard approach to managing compliance. This helps minimize the risk of non-compliance by reducing misinterpretation and duplication of work.
Defining the Purpose
A compliance framework provides a blueprint for meeting regulatory demands. It gets up close and personal with specific requirements, providing step-by-step guidance for achieving compliance efficiently. A framework also offers a more strategic perspective, ensuring that your policies and procedures align with your company's broader goals.
Moreover, a compliance framework can help your business become more competitive by reducing the likelihood of financial penalties and reputational damage. It can also reduce the time and cost of implementing governance, risk management and compliance processes.
The sooner a company adopts a compliance framework, the better. This is because it will have less built-up Compliance infrastructure to unwind. Plus, there are several tools and solutions available that can automate the creation of a unified Compliance framework. For example, a GRC solution like ZenGRC can streamline the framework development process and provide a consolidated view of your security risks and compliance status. This makes it easier to meet regulatory standards and gain customer trust.
Defining the Scope
Regulatory compliance is complex and time-consuming. It's also a critical part of maintaining your business and avoiding costly fines or blocked access to services and platforms.
A framework is a structured way to aggregate, harmonize and integrate all the compliance mandates that affect your organization. It takes a suite of policies, procedure descriptions, mission statements, and control documentation and makes them into a coherent whole. Frameworks bring order to the ceaseless stream of new requirements that are always raining down on an organization so they can be quickly and efficiently incorporated.
Start by identifying laws and regulations that apply to your business. Next, scope your framework elements based on your organizational goals and risk tolerance. Finally, perform a gap analysis to identify any vulnerabilities and remediate them as needed. Having all of this information in one place is helpful for your audit team because it makes it easier to get evidence hands-free at audit time.
Defining the Requirements
Regulatory mandates come at you from all directions, making it challenging to build a disciplined compliance program. Frameworks provide a structured set of guidelines to aggregate, harmonize and integrate all compliance requirements so that you can manage them efficiently.
This is where a good framework really shines. A framework needs to have a methodology for finding Mandates in Authority Documents, extracting those Mandates from the Documents and then integrating them into a single, cohesive set of documentation.
This process can be tedious but it's a necessary part of the framework definition and implementation process. Once you have the system in place to do this, you can then create mappings that identify where existing Compliance documentation (e.g., policies, procedures, Digital Transformation evidence) meets new framework requirements, reducing the need to create new documentation. This translates into saving time and money and also shows that you're committed to meeting your Compliance obligations. That's a great thing to show to regulators!
Defining the Controls
Managing multiple compliance frameworks is challenging and time-consuming. But it's critical for building a robust compliance function, reducing risk, and enabling business.
Compliance frameworks are roadmaps that help organizations navigate regulatory obligations and provide a structure for understanding their requirements. They also enable efficiencies through standardization.
The goal of any good compliance framework is to reduce the number of controls and complexity of implementation. By mapping the controls from each authority document to a common set of control concepts, it's possible to identify and eliminate redundant controls.
This can save time and money for compliance officers as they work to meet their organization's regulatory obligations and reduce compliance risks. For example, one bank had fifty different regulations that impacted its IT and security. By identifying how the controls in these regulations correlated to a common set of control concepts, the company was able to reduce their number of required controls by 76%, saving time and money.
