Is it possible to keep up with compliance and do your day job?
Is cloud compliance causing your team to work overtime to try and keep up with all the changes but you’re unsure if it is worth outsourcing yet?
Balancing the competing demands within your IT department
Among the many challenges and pressures that IT teams face – ranging from cyber security to cloud infrastructure rollouts – compliance issues always seem to sink towards the bottom of the to-do list.
Many IT managers who file cloud compliance under ‘boring but important’ soon find more urgent requests tend to take precedence.
Because of this with the rapid adoption of multi-cloud environments, many organisations are walking through a compliance landscape without a map. Not only do IT leaders have to think about compliance in the technical dimension, but they are also having to consider the legal implications, as well as the specific circumstances governing their particular industry which, in the case of banking and health, for example, can be particularly onerous.
Should you be worried about compliance?
The theoretical worst-case scenario is that a compliance breach can become an existential threat to an organisation. It can be that serious. Even a moderate data breach, should it lead to the discovery of a compliance failure, can result in significant fines, lost customers, eroded trust and damaged brand reputation. The bottom line is that for any organisation handling customer data, compliance is something that can become a ticking time bomb if not pro-actively managed. Once you’ve decided to stick compliance at the top of your to-do list, the next step is to select an effective management approach.
If you are going to summit the compliance mountain yourself, we recommend leveraging a proven assessment tool such as CloudHealth by VMware. It is a cloud management automation tool that can help you assess your clouds and allows for real-time visibility into any misconfigurations based on your compliance policies. Platforms like CloudHealth can help free up your teams time and help you manage your cloud compliance in-house.
Too often though the ‘burden’ of compliance is placed on a team that are not experts. Due to this, it is worth noting that the time involved in compliance management is usually underestimated by those unfamiliar with the field. It takes serious legwork to research and understand the latest comprehensive compliance requirements as it pertains to your business. Compliance regulations, in general, are considered ‘a moving target’ before you even dive into the specific regulations and governing body (or bodies) for your industry. Some sectors, such as finance, health and transportation are heavily regulated, with updates and rule changes occurring at an increasing rate.
Without the latest updates, you won’t know what you’re measuring your organisation’s performance against and, crucially, you could leave yourself with a significant blind spot in terms of compliance risk.
Why getting expert support is often the more responsible option
Finding expertise to help you with the legwork is a shrewd investment of your team’s limited time and resources. Interactive managed services has years of experience managing the ‘boring but important’ work of ongoing, continuous compliance for over 2000 organisations, operating across dozens of industries and multiple international jurisdictions.
We use automation tools like CloudHealth by VMware and operate unobtrusively, using a restricted read-only level of access to your environment, examining only the metadata of the resources, not at any actual data. We then perform a series of scans and assessments, collect the tool-generated data and then use our industry and cloud expertise to make an assessment on what is important to fix and what can move further down the to-do list.
