ISO 27001 is an international standard specifying how organizations should develop and implement an effective information security management system (ISMS). Organizations can apply ISO 27001 to manage their information security risks and be certified as ISO 27001-compliant. The measures to achieve compliance are specified in Annex A of the standard; organizations should select and apply the necessary controls to safeguard their stakeholders based on their own company risk profile.

Modern organizations have huge demands for regulatory compliance, which means a huge amount of documentation that your business must generate and manage to show that it is fulfilling those compliance obligations. As such, a document management system is crucial for an effective compliance program. This article will review what document management systems should be able to do, common challenges in building a document management system, and how to get started with doing so.

When one looks at the marketplace of governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) software platforms, it’s clear that OneTrust has established itself as a key player in the field — and also that the quest for the right GRC solution is a nuanced exercise, depending on your organization’s specific needs and preferences.

Business continuity planning is essential for every organization, regardless of size or industry. You need a plan for potential disasters or disruptions to normal business operations. An effective business continuity plan (BCP) details the procedures and resources needed to respond and recover when adverse events happen.

Most businesses depend on their supply chains for success — but as the Covid-19 pandemic painfully demonstrated, few companies have a full grasp of their supply chain risk and know how to manage that risk well. One crucial issue is how you communicate with your vendors; vendor communication is a vital part of the procurement process. In this article we’ll explore several strategies for efficient and effective communication and how you can implement them.

Organizations are responsible for safeguarding sensitive data in their possession (including customer data) and maintaining a strong cybersecurity posture. One way to do this is by implementing the SOC 2 standard, developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) as a comprehensive framework to evaluate your internal controls for data security and privacy.

As businesses grow, they encounter more regulatory requirements — and soon enough, those requirements can feel like a straitjacket of overlapping obligations. The way to wriggle free from that straitjacket is to develop strong governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) capabilities. One important GRC capability is control mapping: mapping various regulatory requirements to specific controls your business does (or does not yet) have, so that you can see where you need to introduce new controls.

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a crucial security standard for protecting personal data during credit card transactions — and managing PCI compliance is essential for businesses that handle such data. The latest PCI DSS standard, Version 4.0, goes into effect March 2024. Organizations will need to adapt to new requirements and maintain compliance to safeguard sensitive information.

Complementary user entity controls (CUECs) are essential to any SOC 2 compliance project report. These controls help to confirm the service provider’s system is secure by outlining responsibilities that the client (that is, the user) must undertake as well. Developing strategies to identify, map, and monitor CUECs is crucial for organizations that rely on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers as part of their vendor management process. You won’t be able to manage privacy risks without them.

Organizations must stay on top of compliance deadlines and expiration dates. Failure to meet these deadlines can lead to costly penalties, reputational damage, and legal consequences. Fortunately, automated tools can help streamline compliance processes and assure that important deadlines are never missed. In this blog post, we’ll explore how to automate triggers based on expiration dates and the benefits such automation can bring to your organization.

Good documentation is essential for any compliance program, but all that documentation is pointless if you cannot find anything when needed. That’s where document management comes in: keeping crucial files organized and accessible.

Modern digital supply chains are complicated. As ever more businesses outsource ever more business functions to focus on their core responsibilities, those chains stretch around the world and involve ever more links. This has significant economic, security, and privacy ramifications. Tracking the movement of personal data across digital supply chains is difficult— but it is decidedly not optional.

Achieving SOC 2 compliance demonstrates to customers that your organization takes data security and privacy seriously. The journey to achieve SOC 2 compliance, however, is not easy. For example, when you perform a preliminary assessment to determine your current state of security, you’re likely to find multiple gaps between that current state and what SOC 2 standards expect you to have. You’ll need to close those gaps to achieve full SOC 2 compliance.

As data breaches and cyberattacks become more widespread, most businesses are making information security and data privacy a top priority. That means they want to know whether your business can be trusted with their sensitive information. SOC 2 compliance is one of the most effective methods to instill that confidence.

Self-attestations are an increasingly popular tool for cybersecurity compliance frameworks such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) directives. The idea is that organizations attest to meeting specific security controls and requirements without third-party validation.

In today’s complex cybersecurity environment, the need for robust governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) strategies has never been higher. With evolving regulations, heightened security threats, and complex compliance requirements, organizations are turning to GRC software so that they can meet their objectives efficiently and effectively. That said, your choices for GRC software are many.

Governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) are crucial activities for any modern organization. Implementing an effective GRC program, however, is easier said than done. The first and most critical step: defining clear roles and responsibilities so people know what they’re supposed to do to further your GRC A well-structured GRC team facilitates collaboration across departments, leverages cross-functional expertise, and drives consistency in managing governance, risk, and compliance.

To optimize compliance management within an organization, it’s crucial to select the right governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) software for your business. This guide will review the importance of GRC software, how it helps with compliance management, what essential features to look for, and which GRC solutions are top-rated for 2024, with a special focus on ZenGRC as a leading option. GRC software plays a pivotal role helping businesses navigate the modern risk management landscape.