As your company’s chief risk officer, you’re the five-star general responsible for protecting your company. Those compliance standards you have to deal with every year may be a pain in the butt, but they’re part of your arsenal. Keep them sharp and you’ll fight a good fight.
Compliance standards can be unwieldy, and hard to handle. But maybe the problem isn’t the standards as much as you think. It could be the tools you’re using to maintain them.
Just as you can’t use any old stone to sharpen a sword, you shouldn’t use outdated software or solutions to track and manage your compliance efforts. Tools like Excel, Word or project management apps can get you part of the way there, but they’ll never deliver the full functionality you need to protect your organization adequately. These software programs are like using tools out of the Stone Age. And Stone Age protection is what you’ll get from them.
Let’s look at five ways Stone Age compliance software tools increase your company’s risk.
Infographic: 5 Ways Compliance Software Makes Assessments Easy
1) Wrong from the Start
When you start your compliance on the right foot, you’ve got the foundation you need to build a solid structure of security and compliance. A shaky start means a shaky compliance effort. Unfortunately, spreadsheets and Word documents don’t give you that foundation. They give you a jumble of complexity, wasted time, manual labor and workarounds.
TCT Portal compliance software is structured to ensure you’re doing everything correctly, from the start. That means you won’t have aspects of compliance that got forgotten or cobbled together. It also gives you a strong foundation you can count on for all of your compliance efforts—no matter how many standards you need to manage.
2) Chaotic Compliance Process
Chaos creates risk—and, ironically, the compliance management process is full of chaos for most companies. You work furiously to achieve or maintain compliance, culminating with a disorganized mess of strewn evidence, janky spreadsheets and random file structures—on top of several buckets of blood, sweat and tears. It’s a tenuous framework that actually introduces risk to your organization.
Getting started right helps ensure your entire compliance process runs smoothly. TCT Portal gives you a structure that makes your compliance efforts smooth and efficient.
I had a client that was drowning in security and compliance engagements, and their requirements kept increasing. They were extremely relieved once they started leveraging TCT Portal to keep track of everything for them. A huge burden was finally lifted, and things were more effective and better organized. In short, their company had mitigated their risks in security and compliance.
3) Set It and Forget It
When it comes to security and compliance, there’s no “set it and forget it.” Forgetting about compliance means neglecting compliance—and that puts your organization at risk of attacks, expensive violations, and lost customers.
Software tools out of the Stone Age won’t keep your compliance humming along. However, TCT Portal has built-in automation that prompts you to maintain your compliance on a quarterly cadence. The software reminds you and your team to do the required compliance activities on a regular basis, making it easy to keep your compliance up-to-date.
4) Greater Compliance Misunderstanding
Stone Age software tools won’t give you better understanding of compliance. The Stone Age approach means:
- Using a spreadsheet for tracking status
- Marrying that up to wherever you’re storing evidence
- Referencing several different “how to” documents from the governing body of compliance you’re up against
That just makes compliance more confusing—and it increases your company’s risks.
TCT Portal is the only compliance software you need. It’s built to make compliance requirements simpler to understand, consolidate the noise and it gives you greater clarity into your company’s compliance status at a glance.
5) Less Rigor
Often, when I first go into an engagement with a client, they believe that they’re doing everything they’re supposed to do for compliance. Stone Age tools let you get away with little actual adherence to the target objectives. Just check the box in the spreadsheet and you’re done! But that exposes your organization to unseen risks.
I recently had a conversation with someone who said, “We’ve been filling out this information for the past three years, so we’re already compliant.” But filling out a spreadsheet that says you did it is very different from going through each line item and proving you’ve done them all. It’s easy to run down a checklist—it’s another to confirm you have all the evidence for every requirement at line level.
The Only Compliance Software You’ll Need
TCT isn’t a software company—we’re a compliance company. We were born out of daily work in the trenches of security and compliance. TCT Portal was designed from the ground up by compliance specialists, specifically for compliance management—and for nothing else.
Everything we do at TCT is designed to reduce your company’s risk and make compliance easy. When you look at the Stone Age alternative, the decision should be an absolute no-brainer for every business.
Discover the difference TCT Portal can make for your company—get your personalized demo now.
