Staying compliant with regulatory requirements doesn’t have to feel like a losing battle. Chief information security officers (CISOs) continuously grapple with the challenges of staying compliant—not only to protect customer data but also to avoid fines, penalties, and brand damage.
The average cost for organizations that fail to comply with data protection regulations is $14.82M. This number illustrates the necessity of compliance on a large scale.
Compliance is an essential element of staying reputable and reliable. No cybersecurity system is complete without a consistent and effective compliance strategy that accounts for regular audits and updates.
Staying aligned not only with ISO 27001 compliance but also with other industry-specific regulations can be a heavy lift, taking CISOs away from other critical operations and responsibilities.
Industry-specific compliance considerations
Compliance only gets more specific depending on industry. In healthcare organizations—which answer to Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations—a security risk assessment is not enough on its own to be compliant.
Specific steps and policies are required in order to meet HIPAA compliance standards and avoid violations.
A data breach becomes a HIPAA violation when the breach occurs due to an ineffective, incomplete, or outdated compliance program or a direct violation of an organization’s HIPAA policies. Proper continuous compliance is mandatory.
In finance, the stakes are just as high. Financial institutions are prime targets for attacks, so they employ an exhaustive compliance regime under laws such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) or the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA).
As IBM’s Meghan Grable says regarding financial sector compliance, “Regulatory frameworks such as NIST SP 800-209, the ISO/IEC 27040 standard (2024), and the European Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) impose strict requirements for data protection and operational resilience.”
The call for more robust compliance with regulatory standards
According to PwC’s Global Risk Survey 2023, 40% of surveyed business and risk leaders said their organizations have improved their approach to risk to achieve more robust compliance with regulatory standards in the previous 12 months. Looking at leaders from the top performing 5% of organizations, that percentage jumped to 81%.
Compliance automation can be the extra boots on the ground ensuring organizations stay compliant without severe costs or time loss.
And that includes compliance automation on cloud environments. Cloud compliance is the enforcement of specific regulations, standards, and best practices designed to ensure the security and privacy of data stored and processed in cloud environments.
Before we dive into automation, let’s hone in on how being in a cloud environment affects compliance posture.
How cloud environments affect compliance posture (and what to do about it)
Most cloud environments operate from a shared responsibility model that delegates security and compliance responsibilities between the host and the client.
Which responsibilities fall to you as the client typically depend on which package or service you’ve purchased, but more likely than not, you are responsible for the majority of your own compliance coverage on the cloud.
Common regulations that typically apply to both on-prem and cloud servers include HIPAA, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and System and Organization Controls 2 (SOC 2).
Ensuring your cloud service provider is able to meet its side of the shared responsibility bargain is crucial. Given the sheer number of regulations and standards that may affect your organization, this vetting process can feel like a steep undertaking.
Cloud adoption is not slowing down. In O’Reilly’s 2021 cloud adoption survey, 90% of respondents reported using cloud computing, and the cloud has only increased in prominence across multiple industries—though heavily regulated sectors such as finance & banking, government, and healthcare showed lower adoption rates, all below 20%.
There are also more and more tools for creating the most secure cloud environment possible, and it can be a heavy burden to wade through the countless options that all claim to be the solution.
Each of the hyperscaler cloud vendors—AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform—provides an online compliance portal to help users verify that their platforms have the required certification or alignment.
Having this layer of assessment is a boon for ensuring your cloud environment is compliant, trustworthy, and reliable.
For companies that need help with security and compliance for cloud hosting, CloudFirst offers a combination of automated tooling and best-in-class expertise. From automated backups and recovery to AI-powered security monitoring, CloudFirst works closely with our customers to ensure their data is safe and their systems are compliant with all relevant regulations.
Compliance automation
Common pain points range from incompatibility with certain softwares to end-of-life security vulnerabilities to lack of integration options. Maintaining compliance while grappling with these concerns can feel like an uphill battle.
Cloud users tend to agree that it’s a struggle to use these services successfully without the support of additional technologies, tools, and expert advice
That said, there are a few worthy allies that can support cloud compliance automation for cloud deployments.
Ansible from RedHat
Ansible is an open-source IT automation engine that automates provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, orchestration, and multiple other IT processes. As Ansible is provided by RedHat, an IBM subsidiary, it is an ideal fit for Power Systems environments.
Ansible’s automated Policy as Code capabilities help automate compliance and policy enforcement across the full operational life cycle, including AI capabilities—from creating automation to managing IT processes at scale.
One user in the banking world praises the tool’s vendor agnostic function that creates a smooth and simple single automation platform for their entire fleet of servers.
Ansible customers also praise the user-friendly interface and headache-free operations when automating tedious tasks.
Powertech from Fortra
Powertech’s compliance monitor for IBM i turns mountains of IBM i data into useful reports that help system administrators identify opportunities to improve system security.
Fortra also provides Policy Minder, a complementary solution that helps you define and enforce your corporate security policy.
Vanta
Vanta’s trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous cybersecurity automation for IBM i and other Power Systems, from your first framework to complex program management.
Users rave about Vanta’s time-saving abilities, from Duolingo saving 12+ hours a week automating their security and compliance program to Modern Health saving over 100 hours annually on security and compliance.
IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services
IBM’s cloud framework provides a security and compliance structure for the entire ecosystem through a common set of automated, preconfigured controls applied across IBM Cloud services, third-party applications, and financial institution workloads.
The extensive control set within the framework includes but is not limited to security, data privacy, access management, and configuration management.
ezAutomate
ezAutomate by CloudFirst provides a single console for deploying and distributing software, updating operating systems and applications, managing software licensing, monitoring and optimizing IT processes, and detecting and remediating vulnerabilities.
Our tool also includes system automation that automates and monitors critical system messages and application message queues, streamlines manual tasks, and automates jobs.
Alongside automatically responding quickly and accurately to alerts, avoiding system and processing errors, and ensuring jobs run on time and in the correct order, ezAutomate makes compliance automation simpler, faster, and more thorough than ever.
Don’t go into the compliance battle outnumbered
The next time you sit down to perform a manual compliance check, remember that the right compliance automation support can save you:
- millions of dollars in noncompliance fines and breach recovery costs
- hours of time spent on tedious tasks
- headaches from constant audits and updates
With the proper compliance automation support, you get:
- reduced risk of financial turmoil
- higher productivity and system efficiency
- increased credibility and reliability
Equip yourself with the right resources to overcome compliance woes and prevail over daunting, tedious audits. There’s a better way. Reach out to CloudFirst to learn more about how we can help you achieve compliance, every time.
