How Global Enterprises Gain Sanity When Compliance Programs Are Out of Control

We’ve recently been in talks with a global enterprise organization that’s looking for help getting their compliance program in shape. They’ve been in great pain for too long and they’re looking for a way to escape it.

Maybe this is eerily similar to your own compliance scenario. I wouldn’t be surprised, because I see a lot of companies in pain like this. The good news is, there is a way out. It may not feel like it, and maybe you can’t imagine how to make a successful change, but indeed there is a way.

Here’s this company’s situation. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call them Acme Industries.

Is Your Compliance Engagement Running You?

Compliance Management Becomes a Beast

Acme’s security and compliance story started with someone who had a notion to go in and do a particular certification, way back in the day. Since then, the company has expanded in various ways — product offerings, physical footprint, geographical locations, and number of employees. They’re also a conglomeration of several companies, each acting as a silo.

Likewise, Acme has expanded their compliance certifications over the years. The additions have been done organically and without an overall strategy. They now have several certifications, including PCI DSS, HIPAA, ISO 27001, SOC 2, and a couple others that were sprinkled in. 

All this time, they’d been using spreadsheets to manage their compliance program — across their entire enterprise.

Acme Industries’ compliance program has grown into a beastly state and it’s incredibly tough to wrangle. Their compliance engagements were characterized by stress, chaos, and panic.

When they came to TCT, they knew there must be a better way to manage compliance, but they couldn’t see their way out of their current situation — they were too busy just trying to keep their existing compliance activities running on schedule. 

How could Acme take steps to make seismic changes within their organization when their Franken-compliance program had gotten so far out of hand? 

Is It Possible for a Global Enterprise to Manage Compliance Efficiently?

I’ve seen other organizations deal with this kind of problem by simply throwing more money and people at it. Feeling overwhelmed? The answer must be to add more people to share the load, right?

Ironically, in this kind of situation, one of the worst things you can do is to add more people to the mix. Because now you have too many cooks in the kitchen, communication and coordination gets progressively more out of control, and everyone is stepping on each other’s toes. 

Meanwhile, the root cause goes unaddressed.

To Acme’s credit, they knew better than to take this approach. They’d tried it before and it didn’t work. Instead, they came to realize that they needed the help of a third party that had compliance expertise that Acme’s team didn’t possess. 

So as we met with Acme, the question before us was: “Is it even possible to get from the rat’s nest they’re in, to an easier life that made sense and didn’t feel like it was crushing the compliance team?” And if so, how the hell were they going to accomplish it when they could hardly afford the time to think about the problem?

Finding Compliance Management Sanity

We started talking about their existing configuration and setup — what it was that they needed to protect. It quickly became clear that the total scope of everything they needed to include within their compliance program was massive. So we decided to start at the core of what they needed to protect. 

In their case, we used a land and expand approach by starting with going up against a prescriptive compliance standard with a relatively small scope. This core scope would cover the underlying controls that supported the overall organization as well as controls specifically required for the system itself.

Part of their struggle was the sheer amount of manual labor going into their compliance management. The personnel at the center of the compliance program were doing everything manually — hunting down submissions, checking submissions, storing and organizing submissions, updating tracking spreadsheets, checking engagement status, and more. They were in a non-stop scramble mode, just trying to keep up with evidence submissions.

Needless to say, they were wasting a huge amount of time and energy.

Steps to compliance success

It was clear that Acme would gain a tremendous benefit by leveraging TCT Portal as their compliance management system. TCT Portal would automatically track and manage all of the elements surrounding the scope of their engagements. 

We also recommended rolling out the program for PCI DSS as the underlying control framework, which would define the compliance requirements. 

The plan was to roll out a limited-scope PCI engagement, and to only include team members who were absolutely necessary to run the engagement. That way, they could more easily get their arms around this most important core element, and then from there we would start to expand the scope.

Gradual expansion and rollout

We had a couple different directions for expansion:

• Gradually folding in locations and products
• Gradually adding one certification at a time into their compliance automation solution

Things can get pretty complicated as you start to add elements. But the great thing about using TCT Portal is that you can make the technology work for you, rather than doing it all manually. TCT’s mapping capabilities make it incredibly easy to layer in new certifications, without creating a ton of new work or complexity, while making the process smooth and efficient for the participants.

Related: Top Tips to Successfully Implement a New Compliance Management System

A Global Enterprise Finds Compliance Management Sanity

This solution leverages TCT Portal’s Automated Intelligence to do all the heavy lifting for Acme Industries, and it was astounding to watch the transformation of the organization. As the coming years unfold, they’ll be managing their compliance program with competence — no longer being managed by compliance. They’ll finally have control.

It’s fun to watch customers as they start to gain that sanity again. They start to feel relief from the pain, and you can see it slowly wash over them as they see the light. Their compliance world isn’t the shitshow it used to be. 

It will take a period of time for this organization to fully arrive at a fully optimized resolution. It won’t happen overnight. But as they continue to implement the solution, they’ll have a foundation of automation that’s robust and resilient enough to handle future organizational changes. 

Within a few years, I expect they’ll be saying “I can’t believe we used to do it that way.” That’s the response we typically get from customers, and we hear it all the time. 

Acme will enjoy a level of competency, confidence, and control that they’ve never experienced before. The company will see less turnover among the compliance personnel, and there will be a lot less burnout. Further, the corporate culture surrounding the compliance program will be both a healthier and happier one.

Gain Control of Your Compliance Management

Acme Industries isn’t unusual — maybe in the size of their problem, but not in scope. TCT Portal was built to solve these kinds of problems that companies face in managing compliance. 

Believe it or not, it really is possible to regain your compliance sanity. Your compliance program doesn’t have to be in control of you.

Your company can gain competence, confidence, and control of compliance management, and you can start seeing meaningful results almost immediately. While it’ll take several months to get to your goal, and another year or two to run at peak efficiency, you will experience the relief and benefits of TCT Portal very quickly.

Ready to gain control of your compliance management? Request a personalized demo today.