Multi-framework compliance: the key to reducing audit fatigue and enabling strategic improvements to your security posture

Adopting a multi-framework compliance strategy is becoming essential for organizations due to market and customer demands, avoidance of “audit fatigue”, and understanding the overlapping compliance requirements across various frameworks and regulations.

Organizations are now required to be compliant with various frameworks and regulations (SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, etc) in order to work with both vendors and customers. And for each organization, the combination is often unique to their business. It varies based on the types of data they are collecting and processing, the types of services they are providing, the regions and markets they serve, and where they’re operating.

Building a multi-framework strategy that works for your organization

If an organization is pursuing new compliance regulations, the first step is to plan ahead using a compliance roadmap. As a part of this experience, the organization should perform analysis including the value add and how the roadmap aligns with the Company’s strategic marketing and sales visions. Once revenue targets are recognized, the organization can start to plan for budgetary expenses for meeting these specific compliance goals such as operational expenses, hiring expenses to get the right compliance expertise in-house, and the expenses associated with year-round compliance assessments to demonstrate compliance success stories to vendors and prospects.

In the old days, where GRC platforms didn’t exist and the concept of combined audits was always a challenge, this would be very manual. It would mean the organization would need to determine similarities and differences between each compliance regulation they were pursuing. Next, they’d need to put together a plan to attack each framework individually in terms of implementation of the compliance regulations, including choosing the right vendor tools to support their compliance efforts. This usually involved a vast number of tools. The organization would also need to hire specific experts who knew the ins and outs of compliance, and have them run these efforts separately for each regulation and attestation. Doing all of this separately is what creates a sense of  “audit fatigue” where the organization never had a team not in audit and there were excessive amounts of duplicate work with so many evidence requests that were similar across multiple frameworks. 

Consolidated compliance programs to reduce audit fatigue and save time and money for your organization 

The GRC Platform

In today’s world, organizations can consolidate their compliance programs into GRC platforms, allowing for a decrease in operational costs and vendor spending. GRC platforms allow an organization to have a single centralized picture across all of their compliance programs, whether they are maintaining existing programs or implementing existing ones. 

Implementation of new compliance programs is no longer a manual and burdensome effort, as GRC platforms have been built to recognize compliance regulation efficiencies across a wide range of frameworks and regulations. This means that once they’ve done the audit work for a few different frameworks, they’re already halfway completed with some of the other frameworks on their compliance roadmap. 

But it doesn’t just help them speed up individual frameworks or attestations. GRC platforms also allow organizations to streamline existing manual processes, and move aspects of their programs such as continuous monitoring, risk and third party management, access reviews, and evidence gathering all into a single platform. This simplifies a lot of the frustrating manual work that bogs down compliance teams and lets them focus on more strategic initiatives that can strengthen their security posture. 

The Parallel Assessment

Nobody wants to be in an audit all year-round. Doing so allows your organization no time to focus on the internal initiatives that are so critical for expanding your compliance posture. With the introduction of parallel assessments across multiple frameworks, the Thoropass assessment team has the ability to perform your HITRUST e1, SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001 and PCI assessments all in one parallel experience, eliminating audit fatigue. The platform has evidence requests designed in a consolidated manner, so they’re dynamically driven by your assessments through scoping factors and your organization will never need to provide anything twice. 

Imagine a world where you’re only in audit 1-3 months of the year. You’re satisfying the needs for multiple frameworks and working with the same tech enabled auditor year over year. This enables you to manage your program in a single compliance platform, using AI to drive compliance efforts. This helps you meet new compliance regulations with efficiencies, all while saving your organization expenses and time. That’s the experience you can have with Thoropass. Request a demo today.