Get to Know Cybersecurity Compliance Analysis

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Describe the goals of cybersecurity compliance analysis.
Explain the importance of cybersecurity compliance analysis.

What Is Cybersecurity Compliance?

Cybersecurity trailblazers make security intrinsic to their business. There’s a rising and enormous cost associated with data breaches, a trend that’s driving the need for more robust cybersecurity strategies. According to a report by Accenture, in their annual survey among 4,744 global respondents around the current state of cybersecurity resilience, about one-third of all respondents say poor governance and compliance is a problem.

To help protect businesses and consumers from these breaches, governments, regulators, and organizations put in place laws, regulations, standards, and policies that address issues of cybersecurity and data protection. If your business collects, stores, or uses sensitive information, then failure to comply with these mandates can have a profound impact on your business processes. A data breach can lead to a significant financial loss, market share value loss, as well as costs spent on compensating affected customers.

In general, compliance is defined as following rules and meeting requirements. In cybersecurity, compliance means creating and maintaining a program that establishes risk-based controls to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA) of information stored, processed, or transferred. These controls are used to demonstrate adherence to the applicable compliance requirements in order to establish the necessary level of security.

Cybersecurity compliance analysis is the process of assessing whether the behavior of an information technology (IT) system or application conforms to the cybersecurity rules and regulations in force. Effective cybersecurity compliance analysis helps you prioritize compliance risks, maps compliance risks to the applicable parts of the organization that must help address them, and effectively allocates resources to mitigate compliance risks. This analysis can be performed either by an internal team or a third party. While a business may have compliance analysts focused on other types of rules and regulations—such as standard accounting principles, medical treatment protocols, or laws against criminal activity—cybersecurity compliance involves rules and regulations specifically pertaining to protecting sensitive data by securing IT systems.

As a cybersecurity compliance analyst, your work helps to protect sensitive information, including:

Personally identifiable information (PII), such as first and last name, date of birth, and government-issued personal identification number (PIN).
Protected health information (PHI), such as medical history, records of admissions, and prescription records.
Financial data, such as credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and debit card PINs.
Authenticators, including biometrics such as fingerprints, voice prints, and facial recognition data.
Other sensitive data, such as IP addresses, email addresses, usernames, and passwords.

Failing to adequately screen your and your suppliers’ security for protections of this data can increase the likelihood of data breaches, which can shut down operations, damage customer trust, and incur hefty regulatory penalties. For these reasons, your analysis of the security compliance of your organization's internal and external systems must be comprehensive, efficient, and scalable.

A cybersecurity compliance analyst surrounded by a document labeled “PII” and secured with a padlock, as well as a magnifying glass examining a system diagram with a check mark

The Importance of Cybersecurity Compliance

Now that we know what cybersecurity compliance is, let’s talk about why it’s important. Cybersecurity compliance helps companies, governments, and other entities process sensitive data securely. It makes sense of existing and new laws, regulations, standards, and policies to help organizations ensure they follow cybersecurity rules or guidelines.

Cyberattacks happen all the time, and the number and variety of attacks continues to grow, making efficient cybersecurity difficult for most organizations. With a drastic shortage in trained cybersecurity professionals, today’s environment has become increasingly challenging. As a cybersecurity compliance analyst, you play a crucial role in protecting your organization from the next attack.

Cybersecurity Risk Management vs Compliance

It’s important to note that, while similar, cybersecurity risk management and cybersecurity compliance are not necessarily the same thing. Compliance requirements often lag behind cybersecurity risk. Simply put, it’s not enough to just be compliant with the bare minimum regulatory requirements. Your organization should also understand its cybersecurity risk posture as a whole, and put in place policies and controls to respond to these risks. In doing so, you have a crucial role to play. You must work with the cybersecurity risk managers in your organization to ensure not only compliance with applicable regulations, policies, and frameworks but also that the organization is doing its best to create a security culture that extends beyond compliance.

A key part of this is streamlining cybersecurity efforts to be both compliant and secure, without imposing multiple, competing requirements on the business. You do so by cutting across organizational silos, aggregating information, and working with cybersecurity risk managers to provide a 360-degree view of IT risk, compliance, policy management, and vendor security practices. This enables your organization to execute and manage an effective cyber resilience strategy that both addresses compliance concerns and ensures the organization is managing cyber risk holistically without increasing the reporting burden on your teams.

Cybersecurity compliance touches every business that needs to collect, maintain, analyze, and protect some type of sensitive data. This makes cybersecurity compliance important, no matter what industry you work in. What’s more, organizations that perform internal audits and undergo third-party audits and assessments know it plays a critical role in helping their ongoing battle of managing cyber threats. These audits and assessments provide an independent review of existing and needed controls, and help the organization understand and address the diverse risks of the digital landscape.

Meeting or exceeding regulatory compliance standards and requirements has benefits for organizations beyond protecting sensitive data as required by law. Implementing the appropriate safeguards and security measures to protect sensitive customer and employee information bolsters your company’s security posture. This, in turn, helps to protect intellectual property such as trade secrets, software code, product specifications, and other information that gives your company a competitive advantage.

Sum It Up

Now you understand more about cybersecurity compliance analysis. In the next unit, you learn more about the duties and qualifications of a cybersecurity compliance analyst, and discover the skills that help cybersecurity compliance analysts succeed.

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