What is a compliance team?

A compliance team can be a team within an organization, led by the compliance manager, that handles compliance. In larger organizations, it can also be a team of compliance officers, each with their own domain or organizational unit.

Compliancy, also called compliance, refers to adherence to laws and regulations within an organization. Financial firms in particular face compliancy rules, but compliancy is also becoming increasingly important for information security.

Compliance

What is Compliance?

The term compliance literally means adherence. Within organizations, compliance refers to the extent to which you meet the laws and guidelines that apply to that organization.

When people think about compliance, they often focus on financial rules and obligations. Still, companies and public sector organizations must also comply with privacy guidelines, occupational health and safety regulations, and environmental laws. Compliance is not limited to statutory laws; it can also involve sector-specific agreements or internally developed policies. Demonstrable compliance helps you avoid sanctions and qualifies you as a reliable partner or customer. Many organizations, therefore, have active compliance programs with extensive training, reporting, and audits.

What is a Compliance Officer?

Particularly in financial organizations, a so-called compliance officer is appointed. This role must ensure that the organization as a whole complies with laws and regulations. This role is mandatory at banks and insurers, among others. A compliance officer is responsible for:

Oversight of compliance with laws and regulations, including the organization's internal policies.
Monitoring employees' personal securities transactions.
Safeguarding the integrity of the organization and its employees.
Independently investigating incidents and reporting them to executive management or regulators.
Establishing a compliance program, including training and policies, for management and staff.

The focus of compliance officers on financial matters stems from the enormous impact of financial irregularities on companies and markets; think of large-scale fraud, money laundering, or market manipulation. At the same time, there are many other areas, from environmental rules to privacy, where business risks are growing. Consider large-scale data breaches in which sensitive personal data from millions of users is publicly exposed, often with a significant financial impact. You therefore see that, in addition to traditional compliance officers, other internal oversight roles emerge. For example, the Data Protection Officer is responsible for ensuring that everyone within the organization processes personal data safely and correctly.

audit

What Is an Audit?

An audit is a powerful way to demonstrate your compliance. During an audit, it is assessed whether processes, methods, reports, and similar materials meet the relevant laws and guidelines. An audit usually focuses on a specific law or standard and evaluates compliance in a structured manner using documents, reports, and employee interviews. In a financial audit by an accountant, the financial reporting will be checked for compliance with the applicable rules. An information security audit will assess the extent to which the organization is compliant with established security plans and, where applicable, standard norms for that topic. There are both internal and external audits:

In an internal audit, in-house specialists assess the organization to provide a view of its compliance and areas for improvement.
An external audit is performed by a fully independent and qualified auditor, which makes the audit results more authoritative and useful, for example, in an official certification process.

This does not make internal audits any less valuable. Internal audits are often performed as preparation for external audits. Professional organizations also ensure that internal audits are carried out by professionals or departments with sufficient authority and an independent position within the organization, such as the compliance department. This ensures that the results are taken seriously.

Which Regulations Are Important for Information Security?

Information security and privacy are becoming increasingly important, and when planning information security, organizations rely more on general security standards and privacy laws. Since 2016, for example, all organizations must be compliant with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). Many organizations also base their information security on standards such as ISO 27001. You can demonstrate compliance through certification. Many sectors have also developed their own standards derived from ISO 27001, for example, BIO (Baseline Information Security for Government) and NEN 7510 (information security for healthcare). Standards for information security and privacy have also been developed within education.

Why Should You Be Compliant?

Sector-specific standards such as BIO or NEN 7510 are mandatory for organizations within the relevant sectors; there is no choice, you must simply be compliant, and for NEN 7510, you must be officially certified as a healthcare institution. Everyone must also comply with the GDPR. At the same time, for commercial organizations, compliance with ISO 27001 is not mandatory, but it provides a major advantage. If you use your own security rules, it is difficult to demonstrate that your information security and privacy protections meet the requirements of customers and partners. By organizing your security plans according to a widely accepted standard, you can objectively assess your information security against it. Moreover, if an organization is officially certified, customers and partners will trust the external auditor's opinion, and your compliance becomes a 'tick in the box'.

Tips to Ensure Compliance

An important tool to safeguard compliance with relevant laws and standards within organizations is compliance management software. This is a collective term for applications used to manage risks, register and manage policies, and assign tasks and responsibilities. Reporting tools and business dashboards are also important tools for your compliance team.

To be specifically compliant with information security guidelines, Identity and Access Management software is important. With HelloID, for example, you automate account and access rights issuance as much as possible based on a person's role(s) within the organization. This aligns with the 'Principle of Least Privilege', which is now a fundamental principle in many security standards. A person has access only to the applications and data they need to do their job.

In addition, all access rights and changes are fully recorded and continuously monitored in such a system. HelloID records, among other things, all so-called business rule changes, all individually modified access rights, including the requesters and involved approvers, and all access attempts to the infrastructure. This makes that part of your compliance demonstrable at any time, and in an incident such as a data breach, an audit trail is readily available. Data is available through standard reports, and customers can also configure their own analyses. With HelloID, you have all the inputs for internal security evaluations, external audits, and formal certification programs.

Tips to Remain Compliant

Compliance starts with understanding the relevant laws and standards, then implementing your processes and systems to align with those rules. How do you maintain that compliance afterward? A few tips:

Regular Risk Analyses. Many standards are now risk-based. This means you should not mindlessly implement a set of rules. You must continually assess which issues in your organization actually create risks and focus on them. It is important to review this regularly. Are there new risks? Then you must adjust your processes and systems to remain compliant.
Management Must Be Accountable for Compliance. Compliance with laws and regulations should not be a stand-alone activity of a few specialists within a staff department. It concerns key processes of your organization, and compliance must be regularly assessed and discussed within the management team.
Audits and Monitoring. Even if audits are not mandatory, build a professional control cycle within your organization. This lets you regularly test whether you remain compliant and whether additional measures are needed.

Want to learn more about how HelloID can support your compliance? We have whitepapers about our support for, among others, ISO 27001, the BIO, NEN 7510, and the education standards. Our business consultants will be happy to provide more details.

AVG is the Dutch implementation of the European privacy legislation, GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)