The Biden administration said it’s drafting an executive order to help the United States government better defend itself against digital supply chain attacks.

Data privacy has been a hot topic in the tech world for years now. With every new technology come new regulations that require companies to completely re-examine the way they handle private data. Most companies already have a basic data privacy policy they constructed alongside lawyers and tech experts to avoid facing serious fines and penalties. However, compliance isn’t just about focusing on current regulations and meeting the bare minimum requirement to avoid legal consequences.

Most large-scale entities need to prove compliance with multiple regulatory standards. In their efforts to meet their compliance mandates, organizations could suffer a major drain on their time and resources. This possibility holds true regardless of whether they’re finance companies, retailers, manufacturers or hospitality firms. Organizations face an additional obstacle when they have an internally created compliance standard that demands enforcement.

There’s a common misconception that cloud providers handle security, a relic leftover from hosting providers of previous decades. The truth is, cloud providers use a shared responsibility model, leaving a lot of security up to the customer. Stories of AWS compromise are widespread, with attackers often costing organizations many thousands of dollars in damages.

If I were to ask you why you scanned for compliance at your company, I’d bet you’d tell me it was to help you pass requirements easier, to ensure that your audits are good on the first pass and so that you could troubleshoot technical issues with another process. You didn’t know about that last one? Wait, are you telling me you don’t know about the hidden benefits of compliance that you’re getting? Let’s talk.

Getting teams to improve security can be hard work, but it’s an important job that organisations must take seriously to protect an increasingly risky world. For this post, I wanted to explore some ways that an organisation or individual might start building a new security “habit” so that, in time, acting securely becomes automatic.