TL;DR Summary
Compliance monitoring is the ongoing process of ensuring your organization meets regulatory and internal standards. Fortra outlines a five-step approach:
- Build a dedicated team to own compliance efforts.
- Conduct regular audits to identify gaps.
- Establish clear policies based on audit findings.
- Implement monitoring and testing to prevent drift.
- Remediate issues as they arise.
Challenges include juggling multiple standards, manual processes, unclear accountability, and tool sprawl. Solutions involve automation, role clarity, and possibly outsourcing to managed service providers.
The big takeaway: compliance isn’t a one-time checkbox — it’s a continuous, strategic effort that protects your reputation, reduces risk, and can even give you a competitive edge. Fortra can help you map this to your own compliance strategy.
What Is a Compliance Policy?
Before we dive into compliance monitoring, what is a compliance policy? A compliance policy is a formal set of rules that explains how an organization will meet its legal, regulatory, industry, and internal obligations. In cybersecurity, it translates requirements from standards and regulations into clear expectations for protecting data, managing access, configuring systems, responding to incidents, and documenting security activities. Compliance policies vary by industry and region. All major compliance policies define how compliance will be measured, reported, and updated as regulations and technologies evolve.
The Importance of a Compliance Policy
Compliance policies turns broad or complex requirements (such as PCI-DSS) into actions employees can consistently follow. Without that foundation, security teams may interpret obligations differently, responsibilities can become unclear, and important controls may be implemented unevenly across systems and departments. Compliance policies also support accountability and provide evidence that the organization has taken deliberate steps to protect sensitive information.
Definition: What Is Compliance Monitoring?
Compliance monitoring is the process of ensuring that an organization’s policies, controls, and procedures constantly adhere to external regulatory requirements and internal regulations.
The purpose of compliance monitoring is to spot and remediate any compliance errors early. This allows violations to be corrected so organizations can maintain both their positive compliance standing and a strong cybersecurity posture.
When a company puts a compliance monitoring plan in place, it serves several key functions:
Risk Mitigation
By constantly assessing an organization’s compliance infrastructure for weaknesses, security and compliance flaws can be mitigated early on, and penalties from violations avoided.
Regulatory Compliance
It's easy to miss updates on any one of the several data security and privacy standards to which an organization must adhere. Compliance monitoring ensures that new additions are accounted for within your company’s internal policies and that regulatory compliance is consistently achieved.
Reputation Management
Nothing looks worse than falling victim to a data breach that could have been avoided had proper compliance obligations been met. By creating a system to make sure all compliance duties are accomplished regularly, this scenario can be avoided, and organizations can keep their reputation of safety and consumer protection intact.
Accountability
Without a well-defined chain of command and explicit management policies where compliance is concerned, it can be difficult to trace accountability for compliance errors. In these cases, ultimate responsibility usually ends at the top, with the CISO and CEO bearing much of the blame. However, with solid compliance monitoring systems in place and the processes to support it, accountability can be traced back to the right places and demonstrated accurately to stakeholders in the event of a security breach.
Competitive Advantage
Many industries, such as the U.S. Department of Defense, can only enter third-party contracts with entities that adhere to industry-standard compliance requirements (such as the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program). And organizations across all industries want to avoid unnecessary third-party risk from non-compliant entities. Maintaining a solid track record of compliance and demonstrating ongoing processes for continual compliance gives companies a competitive edge.
A compliance monitoring plan enables businesses to enter into contracts, serve customers, operate in domestic and international markets, and expand with confidence.
Compliance Monitoring in the Real World
Compliance monitoring helps organizations demonstrate that required controls are working — not just during an audit, but throughout the year. For example, a company preparing to go public may use monitoring to evaluate access to financial systems, test internal controls, track system changes, and maintain evidence for financial reporting.
Industry and data protection requirements create additional use cases. A healthcare organization might monitor access to electronic patient records and investigate unauthorized activity to meet HIPAA compliance. A retailer that handles payment card information may review security logs, configuration changes, and vulnerabilities to support PCI DSS. Organizations that process personal data may also monitor access, retention, consent, and data-subject requests to meet requirements such as the GDPR or other regional privacy laws.
In each case, compliance monitoring provides a repeatable way to compare real-world activity with established policies and controls. This helps organizations identify compliance drift, document corrective action, and address gaps before they contribute to an audit finding, missed reporting obligation, data breach, or regulatory investigation.
Creating an Effective Compliance Monitoring Plan
An effective compliance monitoring plan ensures organizations have the provisions and people in place to secure their sensitive information — now and in the future. It enables companies to maintain their public image, avoid legal conflicts, and gain the long-term trust of potential partners and clients, making it of paramount importance to the highest levels of management within an organization.
5 Key Steps to Consider When Constructing a Compliance Monitoring Plan
- Create a dedicated team: Without a clear chain of accountability, future compliance monitoring efforts will likely fall by the wayside. Establish a dedicated team of stakeholders responsible for pushing your new compliance monitoring initiative and outsource aid from managed security service providers (MSSPs) if internal resources are scarce.
- Complete a regulatory compliance audit: Determine whether your organization’s current policies enable full compliance with all regulatory requirements under the law. This should not only be done once at the start but should be codified as this process will be the bread and butter of your compliance monitoring systems going forward. Regular audits form the foundation of all future compliance fixes and must be thorough and easily repeatable.
- Establish a comprehensive compliance policy: Take any areas of weakness identified in your regulatory compliance audit and create policies to eliminate them. Take all compliance policies already in existence and keep them. The end result should be a comprehensive compliance plan that can be used as an overarching standard for the organizations. Keep in mind that all applicable regulations must be represented. For example, if you are an international fitness watch company, then HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOX, and even GDPR might apply.
- Implement monitoring and testing strategies: Now that you have the official standard in place, your organization needs to implement monitoring and testing approaches that will prevent compliance drift and keep all subsequent policies and changes in line with established compliance standards.
- Develop remediation plans: Without a codified way to address compliance issues as they come up, your compliance monitoring systems are rendered useless. Up until this point, the purpose of all compliance monitoring actions has been to identify areas of weakness and do so on a regular basis. Now, the ultimate objective must be accomplished: to remediate those deficiencies as they arise and preserve the complete and continuous compliance posture of the organization.
Best Practices for Implementing a Compliance Monitoring Program
- Communicate company-wide: When sailing your new initiative, it's important to communicate throughout your organization that new, systemic changes will be in effect. That way, when asked by individual members of your compliance monitoring committee to rectify mistakes or adhere to new policies, employees will be prepared.
- Train employees: Next, set up training sessions so that users ‘at the tip of the spear’ know how their processes must change to maintain compliance with the new approach.
- Gather feedback: No process is perfect when it first rolls off the line. To smooth out any problems that might arise, have your designated compliance monitoring team establish a process of gleaning feedback throughout the implementation period. Avoid becoming too attached to your initial methodologies; if you give yourself time to perfect them, you will have a compliance monitoring program right-fitted to your unique organization.
The consequences of not implementing a future-proof compliance monitoring system include reputational damage, revoked licenses required to operate, lawsuits and legal fees, and ultimately data breaches and loss of revenue and business.
Overcoming Challenges in Compliance Monitoring
Maintaining compliance with various industry and government regulations can be challenging enough. When you begin establishing a system for verifying compliance over the long term, unexpected difficulties may arise. Common obstacles to creating a reliable compliance monitoring program include:
Creating New Cycles
Establishing a program that did not exist before requires new resource allocation, and often new allowances of staff, budget, and time. Proving the business case for compliance monitoring is key to securing means, and that business case is as simple as the case for compliance itself; if a company wants to avoid compliance repercussions now, would it not want to avoid them always? If so, a compliance monitoring program that ensures enduring alignment is necessary.
Dealing With Multiple Compliance Standards
Often, an organization will be accountable for complying with multitude compliance standards, especially if they do business internationally or across various industries. Ensuring internal systems comply with privacy and security requirements across multiple standards presents a challenge. Assigning separate teams per standard and outsourcing compliance management to MSSPs are possible solutions.
Lingering Manual Processes
When compliance-necessary security controls — like secure file transfer, encryption, and data classification — rely on manual processes, compliance monitoring and mitigation can be even more difficult. Automated security features, vulnerability detection, and remediation can lift the burden of discovering and fixing compliance violations.
Unclear Accountability
While everyone at a company generally knows the organization is responsible for complying with various industry standards, it is often unclear who is accountable for each part of that process. Establishing clear accountability leaders, creating teams with well-defined responsibilities, and training employees on their individual parts within the program will eliminate confusion and streamline compliance monitoring from the ground up.
Too Many Tools
Creating a comprehensive compliance monitoring system requires having full access to all the organization’s data and combining inputs from across data warehouses, reporting platforms, data analytics tools, and more. Vendor consolidation and platforms that integrate various telemetries can streamline data flows to make compliance monitoring easier.
In-house vs. Third-party vs. Hybrid Compliance Solutions
When tackling your compliance monitoring initiative, there are several routes available to organizations that require various levels of internal involvement.
In-House Compliance Monitoring
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Third-Party (Outsourced) Compliance Monitoring
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| Cons | Adjustment period as outsourced team becomes acquainted with internal processes |
Hybrid Compliance Monitoring
A hybrid approach to compliance monitoring can strike the right balance for a lot of organizations as they get to devote fewer internal resources (a handful of staff members as opposed to a whole team) while reaping the benefits of 27/4 eyes-on support, the experience of seasoned compliance experts, and the availability of state-of-the-industry compliance tools on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Resources for Effective Compliance Monitoring
Much of what determines the ease and success of your compliance monitoring program is the compliance software tools at your disposal. The right compliance software can spell the difference between streamlined, automated changes and clunky, manual overhauls that rely on specific individuals for their implementation.
Recommended tools and technologies for compliance monitoring include:
- Vulnerability management, penetration testing, and red teaming solutions identify areas of vulnerability that could result in compliance violations.
- Data loss prevention (DLP) strategies are largely dictated by compliance standards that mandate secure environments and that organizations apply the appropriate level to security no matter how it is stored, where it travels, or in what form it resides.
- Integrity monitoring is required by PCI DSS to ensure your audit trail is not altered without notification, and by HIPAA to ensure that sensitive health data has not been tampered with or destroyed unlawfully.
- Data classification is a prerequisite to any compliance foundation, as data cannot be protected according to compliance mandates if it is not identified and separated by severity first.
- Secure file transfer solutions support compliance monitoring requirements by ensuring protected information stays safe in transit, secure end-to-end, and completely compliant, no matter where it is deployed.
- Security configuration management (SCM) tools are one of the most effective mechanisms for spotting non-compliant behaviors, alerting the organization, and facilitating the remediation of those errors to ensure fully compliant security configurations going forward, even as the organization evolves.
- For IMB i systems, a dedicated compliance monitor can help simplify reporting by pulling together audit and security data from multiple sources and compiling them into a single report.
Managed services can force-multiply the efforts of organizations looking to get the most out of limited resources, and various training and educational resources are available to help compliance professionals get to the next level in compliance monitoring.
Leaning on outside resources can not only help lift the burden of consistent, scalable compliance but can add value to your internal team with seasoned expertise, plug-and-play compliance software, and a network of security professionals focused on staying ahead of the changes, just like you.
Ready to force-multiply your compliance monitoring efforts?
Talk with a Fortra expert about our compliance software and managed security services.