Cybersecurity and IT professionals have an opportunity to enhance operations with regulatory compliance automation. The most accurate and adherent companies leverage automation to obtain a competitive advantage, compensate for staff shortages and bolster digital safety.

It is a necessary development as standards become more intricate alongside budding technologies. Is compliance automation the model solution to complex compliance challenges?

What Are the Main Compliance Challenges?

Compliance standards certify businesses are at peak protection and performing per the law. The climate is changing faster than ever, with topics like artificial intelligence, smart technology and data privacy begging for answers from regulatory bodies.

Novel tech and digital privacy concerns need swift action before malpractice and misuse become societally ingrained. The disconnect between regulatory action and the speed of advancing tech issues is one of the main gaps automation hopes to close.

Human error is another concern — it causes 80% of cybersecurity incidents and cybercrime will cost $14 trillion more in 2027 than now. Having software that automatically knows the best solution to minimize mistakes reduces the chance of human error significantly.

Oversights happen more frequently because analysts are overworked and stressed. Alert fatigue plagues IT and cybersecurity professionals, and with the number of vacancies in the sector, each person must carry the weight of many. Staying compliant should not be an additional concern to overworked staff when automation can handle it.

Many corporations look to SaaS companies to provide compliance automation solutions. While they should be experts in that niche, it is not certain. Companies must learn to develop trust and transparency to implement solutions seamlessly. Third parties are learning alongside the rest of the industry, and everyone must hold them accountable if they make mistakes by providing feedback and asking questions about how their services function.

How Does Compliance Automation Solve These Problems?

Automating compliance produces more benefits than improved cybersecurity, though it is the most prominent objective. It must start with rewiring how analysts collect, store and report data, mainly when only 13% of the world currently has protected data.

Addressing these worries is the only way to make compliance adherence scalable. Apart from reducing the weight of these challenges, what other benefits does compliance automation provide?

Improved Analyst Morale and Staffing

Analysts carry a heavier burden than ever, as each day brings new threats with heightened severity. Fields related to cybersecurity — such as digital forensics — also suffer from staffing shortages and backlogs because manual data processing takes so much time and energy.

This is where automation could help other morale-boosting tools such as machine learning and AI. Compliance automation will not execute the deep work, but it allows cybersecurity and IT professionals to devote more resources to higher-quality work that needs a human touch.

Reinforcing B2B and B2C Relationships

Automation holds numerous enterprises accountable because it is a chain reaction from the public perspective. Customers desire to work with compliant companies and organizations want automation tool providers to know how to program those frameworks.

Additionally, regulatory bodies must be timely, communicative and clear about how and why they release guidelines. If they take a year to instate a new compliance framework about an outdated concern, it will assist fewer people. Enforcing compliance automation pressures expedited response to rising threats, which increases expectations for third parties offering compliance automation services.

Automating compliance makes information more centralized, accessible and visible, increasing the velocity at which updates happen. This is helpful, primarily as compliance stretches across industries. For example, ISO may cover most, while HIPAA only applies to health care. It makes everyone safer and more loyal to brands and partners.

Increasing Productivity Reduces Threat Damage

Analysts are better suited to protect the public when they can identify, contain and remediate digital threats efficiently. With automation, workflows become more consistent across companies, improving defenses. They can do this because automated compliance constantly updates staff on how to perform their jobs best.

Hastened reaction time and action reduce the damage threat actors cause. When problems lie on a waiting list, criminals become more complicated to catch and data becomes irretrievable.

Automating Compliance for a More Secure Digital World

Digital environments fluctuate too wildly nowadays not to have a compliance automation strategy. It is an ideal supplement to manual cybersecurity efforts, primarily as it receives more corporate buy-in.

Wide-scale testing and implementation allow regulatory compliance automation technologies to develop more profoundly. Over time, they will more accurately target the most prominent up-and-coming vulnerabilities, and enlighten analysts and regulatory agencies on how to serve each other.