The Crucial Role of a Cybersecurity Strategy for Businesses in SF Bay Area: Ensuring Security and Compliance
Key Points:
- Cybersecurity compliance is the implementation of protocols defined by a third party to demonstrate a minimum level of cybersecurity.
- While not all organizations fall under cybersecurity compliance, maintaining compliance is a positive step.
- Cybersecurity compliance is an ongoing process that can be a driving force behind the success of an organization.
Much of the focus in 2022 was on the subject of cybersecurity. What wasn’t discussed as deeply or as frequently, but requires equal attention, is the big brother of cyber security, cyber security compliance.
While not all industries fall under cybersecurity compliance, many do. And ensuring your organization’s compliance in this realm is a positive step forward. But what is cybersecurity compliance, and what do you need to do to ensure that your organization is compliant?
What Is Cybersecurity Compliance?
Cybersecurity concerns any organization that works with data or has an internet-exposed edge. Accessing stored data and moving it from one place to another puts your organization at risk and leaves it vulnerable to potential cyberattacks.
When discussing cyber security, many of our recommendations are just that. But when we look at cybersecurity compliance, many of these recommendations are requirements.
While cybersecurity is a set of practices you determine and implement to keep your organization secure, cybersecurity compliance is about implementing protocols defined by a third party to demonstrate a minimum level of cybersecurity. And if you work in industries such as health care, credit card processing, or financial services, the umbrella of cybersecurity compliance is definitely over you.
Cybersecurity compliance involves adhering to a set of standards or regulatory requirements set forth by a government agency or authority group. Compliance is established by implementing controls to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of stored, processed, integrated, or transferred information.
The business world is becoming more data-driven and technologically advanced. As it does, new standards and regulations concerning cybersecurity have made compliance more challenging.
Ensuring Your Organization Is Cybersecurity Compliant
Cybersecurity compliance may seem like a daunting task, but it is manageable. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to developing and implementing a cybersecurity compliance program within your organization, the following steps can help you create a compliance program that meets regulatory compliance requirements for your industry.
Knowing and Implementing All Required Protocols
The first step of cyber security compliance is knowing and implementing your required protocols. Understanding cybersecurity regulations and identifying those that pertain to your specific industry is essential. Cybersecurity regulations and protocols can vary widely depending on the industry your organization is involved with and where your business operates.
Review Your Cybersecurity and Compliance Programs Regularly
The second step to ensuring cybersecurity compliance is regularly reviewing your cybersecurity and compliance programs. You want to develop a baseline to know where you are starting from and enable you to track your progress. This step can be accomplished by performing an initial comprehensive assessment and scheduling regular follow-up assessments.
Reviewing your cybersecurity and compliance programs is not something you do once. Check off the box, and then forget. Regulations governing cybersecurity compliance are changing rapidly, making this an ongoing process.
Understand What Your Gaps Are and Prioritize Your Gaps
After completing an initial comprehensive assessment, your next step is to understand what security gaps exist in your system and prioritize those gaps. It’s important to realize that the assessment’s purpose is to identify existing issues. While any issues identified will need action and attention to remedy them, some will be more critical than others, and some will take longer to correct. Understanding what gaps exist in your security and prioritizing them will help ensure you have the tools in place to be cybersecurity compliant.
Prioritize Your Timeline and Keep With Those Timelines
The fourth step is to prioritize your timeline and keep with those timelines. There’s nothing worse than identifying gaps but then not resolving those in a timely fashion and getting caught in a cybersecurity event when those gaps get leveraged by cybersecurity criminals.
Systematize and Organize Your Cyber Security and Compliance
The next step is to systematize and organize your cyber security and compliance. This step involves ensuring everything concerning your organization’s cybersecurity and compliance is documented and streamlined in one central place. That way, as you go through ongoing audits and assessments, you can quickly look at where you were and where you’re going.
Systematizing and organizing your cyber security and compliance also allows auditors easy access to what you have done up to this point and makes the process much easier for you and your team.
Track, Update, and Refine All Information Constantly
The last and final step is constantly tracking, updating, and refining all information. This step is not something that is set at one particular moment in time. Instead, tracking, updating, and refining information is an ongoing process that must happen continuously.
Needs change, cyber security threats continue to evolve, and you must ensure your process evolves with these changes.
It’s crucial to monitor your compliance program as existing policies are updated continuously or new regulations emerge. A cybersecurity compliance program aims to identify and manage risks and catch cyber threats before they become full-blown data breaches.
Partner With the Cybersecurity Compliance Experts
It’s essential to have business processes that enable you to respond quickly when a cyber attack occurs. Cybersecurity compliance is necessary in many industries and a driving force behind any organization’s success.
Cybersecurity compliance is more than just a one-time exercise or a checkbox for government regulations. Instead, cybersecurity compliance is a formal way of protecting your organization from cyberattacks.
At BACS Consulting Group, we are specialists in cybersecurity and cybersecurity compliance. Our cybersecurity compliance specialists can help you identify and implement the protocols necessary for your organization. We have cybersecurity compliance experience in various industries, including financial services, health care, and biotechnology. Contact us today to learn more about how our team of experts can help you and your organization with cybersecurity compliance.
