Security compliance management is the process of monitoring and assessing systems, devices, and networks to ensure they comply with regulatory requirements, as well as industry and local cybersecurity standards.
Staying on top of compliance isn’t always easy, especially for highly regulated industries and sectors. Regulations and standards change often, as do threats and vulnerabilities. Organizations often have to respond quickly to remain in compliance. This can be difficult in organizations with large, complex infrastructures or teams that are spread out over various platforms or geographic areas, but the stakes are high.
The dangers of falling out of compliance puts you and your customers at risk of breaches, attacks, and of course, at risk of fines from regulatory agencies. For this reason, it’s important to be on top of security compliance management.
So why is security compliance important?
Compliance is critical for many reasons — trust, reputation, safety, and the integrity of your data — but it also affects a business’s bottom line. In fact, we consider noncompliance to be the top factor that amplifies the cost of a data breach.
Compliance is a major factor when it comes to the cost of data breaches; organizations with many compliance failures found that their data breaches cost an average of $2.30 million more than organizations who were in compliance with regulations. The average cost of a data breach with high levels of compliance failures was $5.65 million in 2020.
Why? When companies are out of compliance, their breach costs include fines, penalties, and lawsuits. For this reason, organizations that are out of compliance in highly regulated industries — like healthcare, energy, and finance — tend to experience these additional costs long after the breach has happened, sometimes years later.
