Being a compliance manager can sound tedious to a lot of people. When people think about compliance, they often think in terms of checking boxes on audit forms. However, compliance management is more like putting together a puzzle without having the cover picture. Compliance issues come from a variety of regulations and industry standards, often overlapping while sometimes being disconnected.

As data breach threats increase, governments and industry standards organizations seek to force organizations into maintaining better data security controls. Thus, creating an effective compliance program has become a business operations imperative rather than a series of “best practices.”

Highly regulated financial institutions often struggle with compliance management. As a financial institution matures its cybersecurity compliance program, the document management requirements often mean they need to find automated solutions that can create a single source of truth to ease audit stress.

Effective information security management requires understanding the primary concepts and principles including protection mechanisms, change control/management, and data classification. However, those terms may feel overwhelming at first leading many businesses to follow compliance requirements blindly without fully understanding whether they effectively secure their systems, networks, and software.

Editor’s note: This is the second post in a series about Forseti Security, an open-source security toolkit for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) environments . In our last post, ClearDATA told us about a serverless alternative to the usual way of deploying Forseti in a dedicated VM. In this post, we learn about Forseti’s new External Project Access Scanner. With data breaches or leaks a common headline, cloud data security is a constant concern for organizations today.

A business wants to hire a vendor. However, this vendor does not meet policy standards and has requested an exception. The question you face is whether or not to approve or deny that exception request. What’s good for business sometimes comes with added risk. In fact, many incidents are the direct result of a policy violation. For risk management, and business needs, maybe the answer isn’t a simple yay or nay but a more nuanced approach.

Most companies sit in the middle of a supply chain. You provide a service or product to your customers, but you also use third-parties who enable your business operations. To secure data, you need to engage in increasingly stringent due diligence to mitigate supply chain risk.