Digital threats have led to new cybersecurity regulations that organizations from various industries must follow. Staying compliant with cybersecurity regulations can be legally required, depending on the type of regulation, and organizations face steep penalties if they are non-compliant. With so many different regulations to adhere to, organizations often utilize cybersecurity compliance solutions to help them track compliance over time.
However, choosing compliance software can be overwhelming due to your organization's many options and specific requirements. Do you select an ongoing SaaS or a one-time tool? What about pricing and security budgets? How simple or complex are your organization’s compliance needs? Choosing the best cybersecurity compliance software for your organization depends on your IT teams, scalability, specific regulatory requirements, existing security programs, and business needs.
In this blog, we’ll cover selecting the best cybersecurity compliance programs for your organization’s particular needs—ensuring adherence to evolving compliance standards while enhancing your overall security posture.
Explore how UpGuard can help your organization achieve cybersecurity compliance >
Understanding Cybersecurity Compliance Software
Cybersecurity compliance software is a specific type of software that helps organizations comply with various regulations and standards related to cybersecurity. It is a crucial tool for businesses and service providers that must follow specific cybersecurity frameworks, legal requirements, or industry guidelines.
Compliance software tools play a crucial role in helping organizations adhere to different regulatory frameworks while protecting their digital assets. In addition to meeting legal requirements set out in regulations, compliance software fosters a culture of security awareness and streamlines an organization's compliance protocols.
Key Cybersecurity Regulations
The core of cybersecurity compliance software revolves around the regulatory standards with which it helps organizations stay compliant. It is essential to understand the various cybersecurity regulations that apply to an industry, region, or type of data to select the right compliance software for your organization.
Key cybersecurity regulations include:
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): A European Union regulation that oversees data protection and privacy that applies to all organizations operating within the EU and those outside the EU who offer services to or monitor the behavior of EU data subjects, including data collection
- Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA): A US regulation requiring physical, network, and process security measures to be followed by any organization handling protected healthcare information (i.e., authentication, access control, endpoint security, on-premise access management, etc.).
- Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS): A global standard that requires organizations handling credit and debit card transactions to comply with security measures that safeguard against data theft and fraud, such as data encryption, antivirus measures, and firewalls.
- Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX): A US law that protects financial investors from fraudulent accounting activities, improves disclosures, and prevents fraud.
- ISO 27001: An international standard for information security management that provides a framework to establish, implement, maintain, and improve an information security management system and security controls.
Benefits for Organizations
Cybersecurity compliance software helps organizations adhere to regulations and offers numerous benefits that improve the overall health of an organization. These tools significantly enhance an organization’s operational efficiency, security posture, and security policies.
The advantages of cybersecurity compliance software extend far beyond compliance, including fostering a culture of security and continuous improvement within security teams and the greater organization, mitigating security risks and cyber threats (phishing, malware, third-party risks, etc.), and building trust among stakeholders. Other benefits include:
- Enhanced Security Posture: Organizations can significantly strengthen their cybersecurity defenses by adhering to compliance standards.
- Reduced Legal and Financial Risks: Compliance software helps organizations avoid penalties and fines associated with non-compliance and reduces cybersecurity risks like costly data breaches.
- Improved Risk Management: Automated risk assessments and continuous monitoring allow for proactive risk management and quick response to potential threats, such as malware, cloud-based network security threats, unauthorized access, etc.
- Increased Trust and Credibility: Compliance demonstrates to customers, partners, and stakeholders that the organization protects sensitive information and business integrity.
- Streamlined Compliance Processes: Automates and simplifies the complex process of meeting various regulatory requirements and security frameworks, saving time and resources.
- Better Decision Making: Detailed reports and insights the software provides enable informed decision-making regarding cybersecurity strategies and investments.
Top 3 Features of the Best Cybersecurity Compliance Software
Identifying the most effective features of cybersecurity compliance software is crucial in selecting software that meets regulatory demands and integrates seamlessly into your organization's overall cybersecurity strategy. The best regulatory compliance software should be robust, adaptable, and comprehensive, offering advanced tools to manage and mitigate the ever-evolving cyber attacks and compliance challenges.
Below, we explore the top three features of the best cybersecurity compliance software. Remember that every organization will have specific needs, so evaluate your overall goals and apply them to any software tools you consider.
Integration with Cybersecurity Regulations and Frameworks
The most essential feature of any cybersecurity compliance software is integration with cybersecurity regulations and frameworks. This ensures that the software tool is tailored to meet any specific compliance requirements an organization faces.
With hundreds of cybersecurity regulations and even more frameworks to choose from, a compliance software tool should be able to showcase comprehensive integration and allow organizations to easily identify which regulations and frameworks are relevant to their industry and their ultimate business goals.
Regulation and framework integration should also include the following:
- Targeted Compliance Assurance: Different industries must follow specific cybersecurity regulations. For example, healthcare organizations in the US comply with HIPAA, while credit card companies adhere to PCI -DSS standards. Compliance software that aligns with these regulations ensures effective cybersecurity certifications for specific industries.
- Automatic Updates with Regulatory Changes: Cybersecurity regulations are constantly updated, so compliance software should quickly adapt to these changes, ensuring that organizations remain in line with the latest requirements and avoid non-compliance issues.
- Focused Risk Assessment and Management: Regulations have varying risks and requirements. Cybersecurity compliance software integrated with frameworks provides relevant risk assessments that help direct risk management toward important threats and compliance requirements.
How UpGuard Can Help
UpGuard has a robust library of questionnaires based on regulations and best practices that can be easily integrated for you and your vendors.
Our new SIG Lite Questionnaire is also included alongside cybersecurity frameworks like ISO 27001, NIST, HIPAA, and the GDPR. Created by Shared Assessments, this questionnaire contains 126 risk control questions designed to help organizations standardize the assessment of third-party vendors.
Learn more about UpGuard’s questionnaire library here >
Automated Compliance Testing
Compliance software should not only help organizations achieve compliance with cybersecurity regulations and frameworks but also maintain them. Automated compliance testing is an essential feature that helps large organizations and small businesses maintain their necessary compliance status.
While many platforms may require a yearly point-in-time assessment, many do not offer automated compliance checks. Automated testing brings various benefits, including consistency, set procedures, and real-time monitoring that provides immediate insights into an organization’s compliance status.
Automated compliance testing can also include:
- Facilitating Proactive Compliance Management: Automating compliance testing allows for a proactive approach to compliance management, which is preferred by regulatory bodies as it demonstrates a commitment to maintaining high standards of cybersecurity and compliance.
- Enhanced Accuracy and Reliability: Automated systems can significantly decrease the chances of errors that may arise during manual testing. They offer high precision and dependability in compliance testing, guaranteeing that the organization's compliance status is accurately represented and that all regulatory requirements are being met.
- Scalability and Flexibility: Automated compliance testing offers scalable solutions that adapt to the increasing demands of a growing business without requiring more resources or time. These systems are flexible enough to adjust to new regulations, ensuring that the organization remains compliant despite changes in the regulatory environment.
How UpGuard Can Help
BreachSight is UpGuard's all-in-one external attack management platform, providing a comprehensive overview of your organization's security posture in our dashboard while ensuring compliance with relevant regulations and standards.
With robust, user-friendly features like continuous monitoring, incident response, and insight reporting, your organization will stay up-to-date on any changes in security posture or policies that may affect your compliance with regulations and standards.
Learn more about BreachSight’s features here >
Audit Preparation
Staying compliant with cybersecurity regulations and frameworks involves copious amounts of auditing. Therefore, audit preparation is an indispensable part of any cybersecurity compliance software. Whether internal or external, cybersecurity audits are pivotal in validating the effectiveness of an organization's security measures and compliance with various regulations. The audit preparation capabilities of cybersecurity compliance software play a central role in ensuring these evaluations are successful and less burdensome on the IT infrastructure.
Audit preparation also includes features such as:
- Streamlining the Audit Process: Auditing can be tedious, but automation can streamline the organization and preparation work. Cybersecurity compliance software gathers all the necessary documents, logs, and reports in one centralized location, making it easier for auditors to access necessary information.
- Maintaining Up-to-Date Compliance Records: Auditing comes with a large amount of reporting and documentation, so compliance software with audit preparation provides functionality to organize and maintain compliance records and documents. This helps in demonstrating continuous compliance and adherence to regulations during audits.
- Reducing Non-Compliance Risks: The purpose of audits is to identify areas of non-compliance. Audit preparation features provide quick identification and mitigation of compliance issues, which help organizations avoid penalties and ensure ongoing vulnerability management.
How UpGuard Can Help
Audits require large amounts of documentation and reporting, two features highlighted in UpGuard BreachSight and Vendor Risk. Our Reports Library makes accessing tailor-made reports for different stakeholders in one centralized location easier and faster.
With organized access to your data, you can view your current security rating and twelve-month history, compare your organization's security to your competitors, and categorize your security rating into various risk categories, such as website security and email security. Pull data for specific audits quickly and seamlessly with UpGuard.
Explore more about UpGuard’s reporting features here >
Achieve Cybersecurity Compliance with UpGuard
Cybersecurity compliance protects your organization from non-compliance penalties and helps provide standardized cybersecurity standards that enhance your overall security posture. Our cybersecurity solutions, BreachSight and Vendor Risk, can help your organization achieve cybersecurity compliance by prioritizing internal and external information security. Check out their features below!
UpGuard BreachSight: Attack Surface Management
- Data leak detection: Protect your brand, intellectual property, and customer data with timely detection of data leaks and avoid sensitive data breaches
- Continuous monitoring: Get real-time information and manage exposures, including domains, IPs, and employee credentials
- Attack surface reduction: Reduce your attack surface by discovering exploitable vulnerabilities and domains at risk of typosquatting
- Shared security profile: Eliminate having to answer security questionnaires by creating an UpGuard Trust Page
- Workflows and waivers: Simplify and accelerate how you remediate issues, waive risks, and respond to security queries
- Reporting and insights: Access tailor-made reports for different stakeholders and view information about your external attack surface
UpGuard Vendor Risk: Third-Party Risk Management
- Security questionnaires: Automate security questionnaires with workflows to get deeper insights into your vendors’ security and supplier relationships using industry-standard frameworks like NIST and CIS.
- Security ratings: Instantly understand your vendors' security posture with our data-driven, objective, and dynamic security ratings
- Risk assessments: Let us guide you each step of the way, from gathering evidence, assessing risks, and requesting remediation
- Monitor vendor risk: Monitor your vendors daily and view the details to understand what risks impact their security posture throughout their lifecycle.
- Reporting and insights: UpGuard’s Reports Library makes it easier and faster for you to access tailor-made reports for different stakeholders
- Managed third-party risks: Let our expert analysts manage your third-party risk management program and allocate your security resources
