Compliance management is an essential business enabler that helps your organization stay ahead of regulatory requirements, boost customer trust, and compete in new markets without regulatory setbacks.
The compliance landscape is constantly evolving, and your organization must adapt to stay relevant. Continuous changes in regulations and technologies call for a proactive approach that involves effective procedures without inefficiencies.
If you want to adopt such an approach, this guide will serve as an actionable tool for sustainable compliance management. You’ll learn:
- What compliance management is
- Why managing compliance efficiently is important
- How to develop and execute a solid compliance management strategy
What is compliance management?
Compliance management is an ongoing process of implementing and overseeing control requirements and processes necessary for adhering to the applicable standards and regulations.
On a broad level, compliance management means your organization does the following:
- Keeps track of the regulatory landscape to identify the applicable mandatory regulations and voluntary standards
- Implements the controls necessary to comply with the selected regulations and/or standards
- Updates controls according to regulatory changes and bridges compliance gaps as they appear
Completing these activities efficiently ensures you don’t fall behind on your regulatory obligations.
{{sme_quote_6="/testimonials"}}
{{cta_withimage22="/cta-modules"}} | The Audit ready checklist
Why is compliance management important?
Successful compliance management helps you avoid disruptions caused by unaddressed regulatory gaps, such as:
- Hefty fines and non-financial penalties
- Loss of business
- Damaged stakeholder trust
Still, compliance management doesn’t just help prevent regulatory disruptions—it also plays a key role in broader risk management and governance. While compliance management is often viewed as a practice focused primarily on implementing legal, regulatory, and organizational standards, it's actually a component of a larger Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (GRC) strategy.
Managing your compliance posture enables proactive risk management and lets your organization uphold the governance principles that support continued operations, thus servicing your customers who depend on you.
While there is an overlap between compliance and risk management in achieving scalable GRC, there’s a notable difference between risk management and compliance. Risk management is a broader concept that encompasses compliance management while addressing various risks, such as:
- Strategic
- Financial
- Operational
- Legal
- Reputational
- Health and Safety
With this in mind, compliance management contributes to effective risk management, which lets you navigate the threat landscape more confidently. This applies to both immediate threats like cybersecurity concerns and more indirect ones like loss of reputation, as maintaining compliance is not just about avoiding financial penalties and legal repercussions—it can also be a strategic differentiator in competitive markets.
5 components of compliance management
Effective compliance management revolves around five components:
- Strategies for governance: Organizational compliance requires high-ranking offers to develop and execute different compliance strategies. Roles and responsibilities must be clearly defined to ensure accountability and effectively identify any sources of compliance program blocks.
- Policies and procedures to support implementation: Effective compliance policy management enables organization-wide adherence to the applicable standards by outlining the obligations and best practices everyone should follow.
- A complementary risk management program: As compliance management feeds into effective risk management, it must be aligned with the organization’s risk profile and encompass the necessary risk treatment strategies.
- Reporting workflows: Your compliance methodology should include a clearly outlined chain of command and straightforward reporting procedures. This way, your organization can identify and address any compliance gaps swiftly and effectively.
- Regular audits and continuous compliance: You should identify which audits are necessary for your organization and need to be managed; in many cases, you should also set up continuous control monitoring, as this helps with early identification of compliance gaps rather than waiting for external audits to find them.
{{cta_withimage3="/cta-modules"}} | The ultimate guide to scaling compliance
5 steps to the compliance management process
To develop and implement a continuous compliance management process that is built with continuous improvement in mind, follow these steps:
- Initial assessment (gap analysis): Each time you select a regulation or standard to implement, assess your current compliance posture against the corresponding requirements to identify gaps.
- Implementation: After outlining and analyzing compliance gaps, develop and execute a remediation plan that accounts for all deficiencies and ensures full compliance with the applicable regulation. The plan will typically involve implementing new policies, procedures, and processes aligned with the regulation’s requirements.
- Monitoring and enforcement: Monitor the performance of the implemented controls to ensure they meet all the relevant requirements. If the chosen regulation or standard requires cross-department collaboration (which is often the case), ensure that department heads enforce the changes on their respective teams.
- Audit: With the required controls in place, perform internal or external audits necessary for demonstrating compliance with your chosen standard. Set up a compliance control process that ensures adherence to the relevant requirements and helps you prepare for external audits.
- Continuous improvement: Build a control compliance management workflow that lets you monitor your controls to ensure they remain in place and are effective. Monitor changes in applicable regulations and ensure your controls stay aligned with the latest requirements. Feed any gaps identified here back through your compliance management process.
Challenges to business compliance management
The main challenge organizations face with compliance management is staying on top of the fast-changing regulatory environment. Besides updates to the existing regulations, you might need to keep achieving compliance with new ones to ensure uninterrupted operations.
A good example of this is the increased adoption of AI. After being largely unregulated for a few years, the technology is now facing a comprehensive legal framework.
Similar to how GDPR set the standard for privacy and ISO 27001 for information security governance, AI regulations and frameworks—such as the EU AI Act and ISO 42001—are expected to establish new industry benchmarks and set the path for many countries to follow. Some organizations may not be fully prepared for these changes, especially where they are third-party vendors to the customers they serve.
Another major obstacle is a lack of streamlined compliance workflows. Organizations often rely on manual processes, which can slow down ongoing compliance and prevent organizations from swiftly responding to changes in the regulatory landscape.
In addition, organizations operating in multiple regions need to navigate overlapping and sometimes conflicting regulatory requirements, which can further hinder compliance management efforts.
You can avoid this problem by following some proven best practices.
Compliance management best practices to follow
To make your compliance program efficient and scalable, follow these practices:
- Build repeatable processes: Replace one-off and ad-hoc tasks with consistent, repeatable processes around which you’ll build a compliance management program. Document your procedures and build a knowledge base with tools and processes you can apply across different compliance efforts.
- Enable integration and harmonization: Siloed teams, tools, and processes slow down your compliance program. Aim to combine them into a unified compliance program that fosters streamlined collaboration and eliminates disparate systems.
- Account for future changes: Approach updates to the compliance landscape proactively by following the regulatory trends in your industry (including technological advances, security trends, etc.).
- Invest in an automated compliance platform: A well-designed compliance software can automate various compliance processes, enable continuous monitoring, and provide a single pane of glass for stakeholders to get real-time insights into the organization's compliance program.
Vanta: Your automated compliance management platform
Vanta is a compliance and trust management platform that automates up to 90% of work associated with 35+ major standards and regulations. It does this through a comprehensive automated compliance software product, which includes numerous resources and features, such as:
- Automated evidence collection supported by over 375 integrations
- Centralized control documentation
- Real-time control monitoring through automated hourly tests
- Pre-built and custom controls with a capable policy builder
- Out-of-the-box awareness/training videos
Vanta AI can also help you streamline tedious tasks and workflows like conducting vendor security reviews, answering security questionnaires and efficiently mapping and maintaining your existing controls.
If you want to learn more about these features and see them in action, schedule a custom demo of Vanta’s automated compliance product.
{{cta_simple29="/cta-modules"}} | Automated compliance product page
Compliance
What is compliance management?
Looking to upgrade to continuous, automated GRC and get visibility across your entire program?
Compliance management is an essential business enabler that helps your organization stay ahead of regulatory requirements, boost customer trust, and compete in new markets without regulatory setbacks.
The compliance landscape is constantly evolving, and your organization must adapt to stay relevant. Continuous changes in regulations and technologies call for a proactive approach that involves effective procedures without inefficiencies.
If you want to adopt such an approach, this guide will serve as an actionable tool for sustainable compliance management. You’ll learn:
- What compliance management is
- Why managing compliance efficiently is important
- How to develop and execute a solid compliance management strategy
What is compliance management?
Compliance management is an ongoing process of implementing and overseeing control requirements and processes necessary for adhering to the applicable standards and regulations.
On a broad level, compliance management means your organization does the following:
- Keeps track of the regulatory landscape to identify the applicable mandatory regulations and voluntary standards
- Implements the controls necessary to comply with the selected regulations and/or standards
- Updates controls according to regulatory changes and bridges compliance gaps as they appear
Completing these activities efficiently ensures you don’t fall behind on your regulatory obligations.
{{sme_quote_6="/testimonials"}}
{{cta_withimage22="/cta-modules"}} | The Audit ready checklist
Why is compliance management important?
Successful compliance management helps you avoid disruptions caused by unaddressed regulatory gaps, such as:
- Hefty fines and non-financial penalties
- Loss of business
- Damaged stakeholder trust
Still, compliance management doesn’t just help prevent regulatory disruptions—it also plays a key role in broader risk management and governance. While compliance management is often viewed as a practice focused primarily on implementing legal, regulatory, and organizational standards, it's actually a component of a larger Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (GRC) strategy.
Managing your compliance posture enables proactive risk management and lets your organization uphold the governance principles that support continued operations, thus servicing your customers who depend on you.
While there is an overlap between compliance and risk management in achieving scalable GRC, there’s a notable difference between risk management and compliance. Risk management is a broader concept that encompasses compliance management while addressing various risks, such as:
- Strategic
- Financial
- Operational
- Legal
- Reputational
- Health and Safety
With this in mind, compliance management contributes to effective risk management, which lets you navigate the threat landscape more confidently. This applies to both immediate threats like cybersecurity concerns and more indirect ones like loss of reputation, as maintaining compliance is not just about avoiding financial penalties and legal repercussions—it can also be a strategic differentiator in competitive markets.
5 components of compliance management
Effective compliance management revolves around five components:
- Strategies for governance: Organizational compliance requires high-ranking offers to develop and execute different compliance strategies. Roles and responsibilities must be clearly defined to ensure accountability and effectively identify any sources of compliance program blocks.
- Policies and procedures to support implementation: Effective compliance policy management enables organization-wide adherence to the applicable standards by outlining the obligations and best practices everyone should follow.
- A complementary risk management program: As compliance management feeds into effective risk management, it must be aligned with the organization’s risk profile and encompass the necessary risk treatment strategies.
- Reporting workflows: Your compliance methodology should include a clearly outlined chain of command and straightforward reporting procedures. This way, your organization can identify and address any compliance gaps swiftly and effectively.
- Regular audits and continuous compliance: You should identify which audits are necessary for your organization and need to be managed; in many cases, you should also set up continuous control monitoring, as this helps with early identification of compliance gaps rather than waiting for external audits to find them.
{{cta_withimage3="/cta-modules"}} | The ultimate guide to scaling compliance
5 steps to the compliance management process
To develop and implement a continuous compliance management process that is built with continuous improvement in mind, follow these steps:
- Initial assessment (gap analysis): Each time you select a regulation or standard to implement, assess your current compliance posture against the corresponding requirements to identify gaps.
- Implementation: After outlining and analyzing compliance gaps, develop and execute a remediation plan that accounts for all deficiencies and ensures full compliance with the applicable regulation. The plan will typically involve implementing new policies, procedures, and processes aligned with the regulation’s requirements.
- Monitoring and enforcement: Monitor the performance of the implemented controls to ensure they meet all the relevant requirements. If the chosen regulation or standard requires cross-department collaboration (which is often the case), ensure that department heads enforce the changes on their respective teams.
- Audit: With the required controls in place, perform internal or external audits necessary for demonstrating compliance with your chosen standard. Set up a compliance control process that ensures adherence to the relevant requirements and helps you prepare for external audits.
- Continuous improvement: Build a control compliance management workflow that lets you monitor your controls to ensure they remain in place and are effective. Monitor changes in applicable regulations and ensure your controls stay aligned with the latest requirements. Feed any gaps identified here back through your compliance management process.
Challenges to business compliance management
The main challenge organizations face with compliance management is staying on top of the fast-changing regulatory environment. Besides updates to the existing regulations, you might need to keep achieving compliance with new ones to ensure uninterrupted operations.
A good example of this is the increased adoption of AI. After being largely unregulated for a few years, the technology is now facing a comprehensive legal framework.
Similar to how GDPR set the standard for privacy and ISO 27001 for information security governance, AI regulations and frameworks—such as the EU AI Act and ISO 42001—are expected to establish new industry benchmarks and set the path for many countries to follow. Some organizations may not be fully prepared for these changes, especially where they are third-party vendors to the customers they serve.
Another major obstacle is a lack of streamlined compliance workflows. Organizations often rely on manual processes, which can slow down ongoing compliance and prevent organizations from swiftly responding to changes in the regulatory landscape.
In addition, organizations operating in multiple regions need to navigate overlapping and sometimes conflicting regulatory requirements, which can further hinder compliance management efforts.
You can avoid this problem by following some proven best practices.
Compliance management best practices to follow
To make your compliance program efficient and scalable, follow these practices:
- Build repeatable processes: Replace one-off and ad-hoc tasks with consistent, repeatable processes around which you’ll build a compliance management program. Document your procedures and build a knowledge base with tools and processes you can apply across different compliance efforts.
- Enable integration and harmonization: Siloed teams, tools, and processes slow down your compliance program. Aim to combine them into a unified compliance program that fosters streamlined collaboration and eliminates disparate systems.
- Account for future changes: Approach updates to the compliance landscape proactively by following the regulatory trends in your industry (including technological advances, security trends, etc.).
- Invest in an automated compliance platform: A well-designed compliance software can automate various compliance processes, enable continuous monitoring, and provide a single pane of glass for stakeholders to get real-time insights into the organization's compliance program.
Vanta: Your automated compliance management platform
Vanta is a compliance and trust management platform that automates up to 90% of work associated with 35+ major standards and regulations. It does this through a comprehensive automated compliance software product, which includes numerous resources and features, such as:
- Automated evidence collection supported by over 375 integrations
- Centralized control documentation
- Real-time control monitoring through automated hourly tests
- Pre-built and custom controls with a capable policy builder
- Out-of-the-box awareness/training videos
Vanta AI can also help you streamline tedious tasks and workflows like conducting vendor security reviews, answering security questionnaires and efficiently mapping and maintaining your existing controls.
If you want to learn more about these features and see them in action, schedule a custom demo of Vanta’s automated compliance product.
{{cta_simple29="/cta-modules"}} | Automated compliance product page
| Role: | GRC responsibilities: |
|---|---|
| Board of directors | Central to the overarching GRC strategy, this group sets the direction for the compliance strategy. They determine which standards and regulations are necessary for compliance and align the GRC strategy with business objectives. |
| Chief financial officer | Primary responsibility for the success of the GRC program and for reporting results to the board. |
| Operations managers from relevant departments | This group owns processes. They are responsible for the success and direction of risk management and compliance within their departments. |
| Representatives from relevant departments | These are the activity owners. These team members are responsible for carrying out specific compliance and risk management tasks within their departments and for integrating these tasks into their workflows. |
| Contract managers from relevant department | These team members are responsible for managing interactions with vendors and other third parties in their department to ensure all risk management and compliance measures are being taken. |
| Chief information security officer (CISO) | Defines the organization’s information security policy, designs risk and vulnerability assessments, and develops information security policies. |
| Data protection officer (DPO) or legal counsel | Develops goals for data privacy based on legal regulations and other compliance needs, designs and implements privacy policies and practices, and assesses these practices for effectiveness. |
| GRC lead | Responsible for overseeing the execution of the GRC program in collaboration with the executive team as well as maintaining the organization’s library of security controls. |
| Cybersecurity analyst(s) | Implements and monitors cybersecurity measures that are in line with the GRC program and business objectives. |
| Compliance analyst(s) | Monitors the organization’s compliance with all regulations and standards necessary, identifies any compliance gaps, and works to mitigate them. |
| Risk analyst(s) | Carries out the risk management program for the organization and serves as a resource for risk management across various departments, including identifying, mitigating, and monitoring risks. |
| IT security specialist(s) | Implements security controls within the IT system in coordination with the cybersecurity analyst(s). |
Explore more GRC articles
Introduction to GRC
Implementing a GRC program
Optimizing a GRC program
Governance
Risk
Compliance
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