Compliance 101: Your Guide to IT Compliance

08 Mar Compliance 101: Your Guide to IT Compliance

Posted at 06:55h in Compliance by Simon Spencer

As with anything in the world, there are rules and regulations on your organisation’s IT implementation — to ensure that you’re not endangering your business, your employees, or your customers. Following these regulations is known as compliance, and it’s something that every organisation needs to be aware of.

Compliance regulations have existed worldwide since the 1930s for lots of different industries — with the first being the Securities Act of 1933 — but with the major onset of IT in the workplace, IT compliance has become a major focus for governments and regulatory bodies worldwide.

In this article, we’re going to go over the ins and outs of IT compliance, including why you should ensure that you’re compliant and how you can use Microsoft Purview to assist you with remaining compliant.

The Need for IT Compliance

To put it simply, IT compliance helps protect your organisation, your employees, your customers, and the wider business environment. After all, being reckless with your organisation’s security and sanctity will lead to damage to not only your bottom line but to everyone that you provide for — which could be massively disruptive.

For example, the most important compliance regulation of our lifetime — the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — was created to ‘harmonise’ data privacy laws across Europe, to ensure that European citizens were protected from possible data breaches and other lazy malpractice from companies not putting enough investment into the protection and sanctity of data.

This framework was originally created for Europeans but has essentially become a worldwide compliance standard, being a model for the Data Protection Acts of non-EU countries such as South Korea, Japan, and the United Kingdom — which uses a UK GDPR. The reason for this is that — as a country — the governing bodies have a duty of care to their citizens to ensure that their information isn’t being recklessly abused, which is why organisations have to massively commit to following GDPR.

The same can be said for the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) — which ensures that financial data, such as credit and debit card numbers, are stored securely. This exists to obviously protect those online from a negative experience when shopping — but also creates a trust factor for those companies that are PCI DSS compliant.

This is another huge reason why IT compliance is beneficial for your organisation — as showing that you’re compliant will help place confidence in your organisation as one that’s not only trustworthy but also willing to take the extra step to ensure that they do everything correctly.

Risks of Being Non-Compliant

There are, however, risks of being non-compliant. Depending on the regulatory body of the compliance regulation that you’re not complying with, it can range from fines and charges to full litigation and even prosecution.

The European Commission has guidelines on GDPR non-compliance, and states that there are a few different punishments for different kinds of breaches of their compliance regulations —

Likely Infringement: A warning may be issued.
Infringement: The possibilities include a reprimand, a temporary or definitive ban on processing and a fine of up to €20 million or 4% of the business’s total annual worldwide turnover.

These aren’t just threats, though. Organisations such as British Airways and Marriott International have already experienced charges for breaching GDPR — with British Airways being fined almost £200million by the ICO for breaching GDPR regulations and being reckless about their security.

This is why it’s so important to ensure that you’re compliant in every aspect that you have to be — not only will your organisation suffer from possible disruption or even catastrophe in the event of a security incident, but in the event of a compliance breach — you may find yourself liable and shelling out to pay for hefty fines on top of the damages caused by said incident.

This can have further repercussions on your organisation too, though. Even if you somehow manage to avoid the fines, the disregard for compliance regulations will appear as a stain on your reputation and will indicate to people that your organisation simply cannot be trusted — which is not a position that you want to be in.

How Microsoft Purview Can Help

Microsoft Purview is an all-in-one compliance and data governance platform that will help you safeguard your data and ensure that you’re not breaching compliance whatsoever. Purview exists to help you audit and track your organisation’s data security and compliance and gives you actionable steps to ensure that you remain compliant in the future.

With Purview Governance Portal, you have a single place that will let you keep track of all governance and compliance assets and information within your organisation — with a knowledge base and a glossary to ensure everyone has access to the tools that they need to understand compliance fully.

This means that you don’t need to invest in separate tools to handle all of your data governance and compliance, as Microsoft Purview Governance Portal lets you take care of it all from one central hub with ease.

The Microsoft Purview suite also includes data loss prevention and insider risk management tools, which will help you further your organisation’s commitment to good security and take control of your organisation’s security strategy, keeping your data safe and secure.

Ready to Get Started?

Compliance regulations are important to follow — not just because not doing so will result in legal consequences, but also because doing so will protect your organisation, your team, and your customers.

However, the punishment for doing so won’t be light — as organisations like British Airways have learnt, regulators don’t take the flaunting of compliance regulations lightly. Microsoft Purview is the best tool to ensure that you remain compliant, and will help you keep track of governance throughout your organisation.

If you’re looking to improve your organisation’s compliance but need assistance, reach out to us today. Our experts are here to provide you with a helping hand along the way and will ensure that you’re not breaching any compliance standards.