Regain Sanity and Manage Multiple Compliance Standards Easily

Stop me if you’ve felt this pain. Your company has an obligation to maintain multiple compliance standards, such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2, and/or some other security standard. For years, you’ve been managing the engagement in a set of spreadsheets through brute force with a dose of blood, sweat and many tears. You dread every minute of it, but somehow you have managed not to completely lose your mind.

Until you learn that your organization needs to layer on yet another security framework to comply with — and maybe even a couple more on the horizon. 

It doesn’t take long to realize that your work grows exponentially more difficult as you add more certifications to your compliance program. Managing multiple spreadsheets and file drop zones isn’t just a chore, it’s damn near impossible.

For many compliance managers and CISOs, it can be isolating and defeating to manage multiple compliance standards, and you feel like you’re left to struggle on your own. The reality is, you aren’t alone: compliance management sucks for everyone — especially when you have multiple compliance certifications to juggle.

Good news: You don’t have to kill yourself trying to manage compliance with multiple certifications. In fact, you’d be surprised how much work can be taken off your plate. Let’s explore what you can do to lighten your load when you have multiple certifications to comply with.

Related: Multiple Compliance Standards to Meet? Live Linking Makes That Mountain into a Molehill

TCT Portal was designed by compliance experts who have been in the industry for decades. Our compliance tool was built from the ground up to streamline the management of any compliance standard. That means streamlining not just single-standard engagements (although we certainly can), but the TCT Portal really shines when facilitating engagements that have a number of compliance certifications or standards.

Let’s take a look at the ways TCT Portal makes life easier for companies with multiple compliance standards to manage.

Automate Any Compliance Standard

No matter what compliance framework you’re managing, TCT Portal can automate it. The compliance software now supports more than 80 different compliance standards, and we continue to add more based on clients’ needs. The most common compliance certifications are PCI DSS, SOC 2, NIST CSF, HIPAA, and ISO 27001. You can also find CMMC, CCSS, and uncommon standards like Exostar and NAID.

If an industry certification you need isn’t already in our compliance management system, we can add it for you quickly and integrate it into your instance of the software — at no cost.

No More Duplicate Work

One of the most painful elements of managing multiple compliance engagements is the significant volume of duplicate work. You’re continually fulfilling the same requirements across your various standards, and going through the same motions, again and again and again. 

What if, instead of managing a bunch of disparate compliance engagements, you just had one main standard that you had to manage — and TCT Portal took care of all the others for you? How much time and frustration would that eliminate for you?

The beauty of TCT Portal is that it has the capability to completely eliminate duplicate tasks. No matter how many standards you have, you only need to upload each piece of evidence once. For example, the antivirus items, the network diagrams, and the device inventories you need to manage for PCI DSS are also automatically applied to your SOC 2 and HIPAA engagements, as appropriate. 

TCT Portal makes it easy to manage multiple compliance standards all in one place, and with one workflow. We use mapping functions to apply common requirements across standards. Duplicate tasks automatically populate in all of the compliance tracks you’re managing.

For example, when you upload your network diagrams in PCI DSS, TCT Portal automatically uploads it to all your other engagements instantaneously. You don’t have to do a thing.

Use Just One Simple List

What if you could have one master list of all the items you need to provide to all of your multiple Assessors, and just operate off of that? 

Because you have the ability to map any industry standard to the system, you also have the ability to create your own custom framework and map it to your specific set of standards. You can then load all of your evidence for all of your various compliance frameworks into that one single custom standard. TCT Portal then uses the mapping function to populate all of your industry standards off of that master list.

You now have one list to rule them all.

Now, no matter how many different security and compliance standards you need to go up against, there’s only one custom standard you need to manage. Whether you have three standards or ten standards, you’re managing them all within one custom list. And instead of fulfilling thousands of individual line items across a multitude of standards, you only have perhaps a couple hundred items. 

Your compliance management couldn’t get more streamlined than that.

Allocate Resources to Revenue Centers

With TCT Portal, you can do more with fewer resources. Whereas before you may have always felt understaffed, TCT Portal makes it possible to keep compliance engagements under control with a smaller team. 

Instead, you can now redeploy resources and make more effective decisions about how you want to consume your people’s hours. Without TCT Portal, you inevitably pour gasoline on hundreds or thousands of man-hours and light them on fire. 

Imagine the productivity your organization can realize with all the time that’s freed up from useless waste each year for innovation, big-problem solving or any other need you decide to fulfill. 

Status at a Glance — Even with Multiple Teams

When you have multiple certs, you probably have various internal groups that are responsible for various elements of each certification. That complicates things, because you have to manage multiple teams throughout your organization. Each team has its own everyday work to do, with its own set of priorities and competing time tables. 

It can be a monstrous job to keep track of who has what assignments, when they’re due, and what roadblocks are getting in the way. 

Fortunately, TCT Portal makes it easy to organize and track all of those various elements. Everything you need to know in order to make your compliance engagement a success is captured and displayed in real time. And it’s presented in a way that allows you to see the engagement status and make decisions at a glance. 

Even when you have multiple compliance standards to meet.

This little feature alone can save you hundreds of man hours per engagement.

Automated Nagging — So You Don’t Have To

Another complication with multiple certs is maintaining visibility and reminders for all of your personnel. You’ll often get questions like, “What items do I have again?” or “What did I provide you with last time around for this particular item?” 

It’s a natural human tendency to put things off until the last minute, then have an “Oh Crap!” moment and crash through all of their task assignments right before they’re due. Meanwhile, you’ve been on their case for the last three months to deliver those items.

And the more standards you need to be compliant with, the more it evaporates your time.

TCT Portal automates all of it. The platform does the nagging for you. It provides historical records so people can see what evidence they provided last time. It makes it easy to see who has what tasks still outstanding, and what is needed from each person. 

And the best part is, you always have your finger on the pulse of every certification you’re going up against. You might have three different compliance engagements all at various states of completion. TCT Portal makes it easy to keep every plate spinning, because you’re leveraging the power of automation combined with total visibility.

Manage Multiple Assessors

If you’re managing multiple compliance standards, you’re also probably working with multiple QSAs and assessment firms. Your HIPAA Assessor isn’t a PCI QSA, so you need to bring on someone new for that standard. After a while, you may have as many as three to five different Assessors across your compliance engagements. 

As you grow in your breadth of certifications, you’re also growing in the complexity and redundancy of Assessor communications and collaborations. 

You aren’t just managing your compliance certifications, you’re managing your Assessors as well. Who needs that extra effort?

TCT Portal makes it easy to collaborate with all of your Assessors through the one platform. Each Assessor has all of the access they need — and only the access they need — to run their engagement with you.

For a lot of organizations, they’ll start with multiple Assessors, and eventually consolidate those down into fewer Assessors that have the capability to handle more than one (or all) of your target certifications. Even in the case where your organization has consolidated their Assessor count, you’ll more than likely find that the Assessor has separate teams of people internally that specialize in different standards. Which means that the complexity of numerous Assessors from your chosen Assessment firm is similarly simplified through the Automated Intelligence of the TCT Portal.

Compliance Management Doesn’t Have to Suck

Managing compliance sucks, but TCT Portal makes it suck a hell of a lot less. Especially when you’re managing multiple compliance engagements. You don’t have to grit your teeth and force your way through another engagement, running on fumes and missing time with family.

Instead, you can automate 65 percent of your compliance engagements and automate all the most painful parts of your labor. Find out what kind of difference TCT Portal can make for your company — schedule a demo today.