How Does a Compliance First Mindset Limit Your Liabilities?

Avoid penalties, lawsuits, and compliance risks by prioritizing the solutions that match your organization's requirements.

By adopting a “Compliance First” strategy when choosing IT solutions and vendors, you identify ones that do not comply with your compliance requirements. This allows you to eliminate the non-compliant options from your selection process, evaluate your current solutions and vendors, and replace those that cannot support your compliance requirements.

In simple terms, ­­compliance is anything someone else makes you do. This means laws, regulations, contracts, and even the terms of a cyber insurance policy. Failure to act responsibly can have devastating results: hefty penalties, lawsuits, investigations, and failure to have insurance cover big claims.

Why is Staying Compliant So Important?

If you think compliance is unimportant for you or only applies to enterprises, think again. No organization is immune to compliance regulations, which is actually a good thing. By knowing your organization must be compliant, you can avoid fines and penalties, improve operational safety, improve public relations, prevent attrition and ensure that liability insurance claims pay out in the event of an incident.

Overall, compliance has a measurable Return on Investment (ROI). This is why having a Compliance First mindset is so important!

By making the “Compliance First” approach your first step, you will meet minimum regulatory requirements to protect against fines while also staying in compliance with liability insurance requirements. After this, you can improve your organization’s compliance posture further by adopting additional measures.

Did You Know That Just One Compliance Mistake Can Invalidate Liability Insurance Claims?

Many small and medium-sized organizations prefer to use free or the most affordable solutions possible. If you’re one of them, keep in mind that this is not a safe practice.

Without solutions that meet security, encryption, and reporting standards outlined by regulations that you must abide by (CMMC, GDPR, HIPAA, NIST, PCI-DSS), you could face three key problems:

1. Suffering a preventable catastrophic breach
2. Risk of non-compliance and subsequent fines
3. Risk of violating and nullifying liability insurance policies, leaving you financially exposed

Using cheap or low-cost non-compliant solutions may be tempting, but it can cause your organization to assume all the reputational and financial risk and cost in the event a compliance violation comes to light.

Remember that you do not have to be caught use a bunch of non-compliant solutions to invalidate your insurance; even using just a single non-compliant solution can cause your claim to be denied.

All your insurance claims that cover compliance regulation infractions specific to CMMC, GDPR, HIPAA, NIST, or PCI-DSS can be invalidated by a single act of negligence.

Overwhelmed by the vague regulatory guidelines? You are not alone. But it is definitely worth taking the time to learn more about your requirements, so your organization can become adequately protected.

What is the Cost of Non-Compliance?

Many organizations think of compliance spending as an unrewarded cost of business rather than an investment in protecting assets. This leads to less spending on compliant software or even under-staffing of compliance teams. If your organization eventually ends up being non-compliant, it can have devastating reputational and financial consequences.

HIPAA penalties often exceed $1 million. Defense contractors can lose their main source of revenue by not complying with cybersecurity requirements.

If you accept credit cards, PCI-DSS violations can draw penalties ranging from $5,000 to $100,000 per month by payment providers (VISA, Discover, and others). Penalties depend on the volume of clients and transactions.

GDPR violations lead to hefty violation fines worth 2%-4% or more of company revenue based on the severity of the violation.

Even the information you have about your workforce is protected by state and federal laws. This may seem like a lot at first, but that is why leading with a "Compliance First" approach is vital to ensuring you stay compliant in the future.

Begin With a "Compliance First" Approach for Product Selection

A “Compliance First” approach covers a wide range of critical considerations to keep an organization compliant. However, if you do not know where to begin, start with a business tool audit. The internal tools to audit for compliance are:

• Voice services like VoIP
• Cloud storage and file hosting
• Document sharing and transfer services
• Productivity tools
• Communication tools
• Any digital tool, product, or service used for business

Many regulations require data, including voice messages and emails, to be encrypted in transit and when stored. Find out if your version is compliant by reviewing each solution’s product sheet or release notes.

If it’s still unclear whether the solution provides the type of compliance you’re looking for, contact the technology vendor directly to get an independent audit report of their compliance with the requirements you must meet.

How Can This Change Your Organization for the Better?

The “Compliance First” approach can help develop a compliance-oriented culture within your business, thus preventing your business from falling into the quicksand of non-compliance.

We understand that implementing the “Compliance First”’ approach is challenging. But with the right partner by your side, you can seamlessly assess your current state of compliance, providing the critical insights you need to identify key issues and start your simplified path to compliance.

Let us Take the Chaos Out of Compliance

You can trust Managed Cybersecurity from Data Networks to take the chaos out of compliance. Our solution helps you achieve and maintain compliance with global standards such as CMMC, GDPR, HIPAA, NIST CSF, PCI. Our team also helps manage Cyber Liability Insurance requirements. 

Learn more by contacting us for guidance!