What is Compliance Reporting?

There are numerous industries that, in one way or another, deal with sensitive data on the regular. In order to protect this data, numerous laws, regulations, and other requirements have been put on the books that require businesses to maintain—as well as prove—their compliance to them.

Today, we wanted to focus on how a business would prove their compliance, so we’re going to dive into the subject of compliance reporting.

Understanding Compliance Reporting

Let’s say you were beholden to a certain compliance standard or regulation. If you were to be audited, your compliance report—your documented evidence that you had done your due diligence in ensuring your company was in line with established requirements—could be used to prove that yes, you were in fact doing what was required of you.

It’s basically a progress report concerning your level of compliance. By outlining what is being done appropriately and where you need to do a bit more, a compliance report gives you a reference for your decision-making as well as the proof that an auditor will be looking for. As a managed service provider, we’re primarily concerned with those compliance standards that are directed towards your business’ IT and the data it contains.

Standards that Compliance Reporting Could Benefit

Depending on your industry, you may be beholden to a few standards that could be much more easily managed through proper reporting practices. For instance:

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
The HIPAA Privacy Rule and the HIPAA Security Rule set the standards that need to be upheld when handling a person’s personal health information and the safeguards that need to be in place to protect them, respectively. 

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework
NIST’s framework takes various best practices and combines them with industry standards to help guide businesses to more secure operations and mitigated risks.

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)
In order to accept payment cards as a form of tender, a business needs to uphold the requirements outlined in these data security standards, as established by the payment card providers themselves. These standards also put requirements on those who develop the applications used to make transactions.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
Any business that collects data about citizens of the European Union needs to abide by the security baselines dictated by the GDPR.

This is just a small sample of the various regulations out there, but even from this limited view the benefits of compliance reporting should be clear. Each of these standards places heavy consequences on those who are noncompliant. Therefore, any means a business has to better ensure they have accomplished the level of compliance needed to pass should be welcome.

Are There Compliance Standards You Need to Meet? We Can Help!

We specialize in providing IT services that meet the various needs that a business has, including its need for compliant and effective operational solutions. Give us a call at (703) 821-8200 to find out how we can assist you.