Compliance happens to be a hot-button issue in IT these days. Legal and data privacy challenges can be overwhelming for any tech organization, big or small. Despite the challenges, the IT industry must remain in proper corporate compliance to provide the ultimate protection and security to sensitive customer data and information.
And this isn’t an easy job to carry out. Often, the professionals responsible for maintaining such standards fail to meet the trusts’ appropriate guidelines and rules.
Although there are plenty of chief compliance officer jobs available to take care of such standards, companies struggle to comply with the industry.
Are you curious to know the biggest corporate compliance challenges faced by the IT sector? Find out the major ones right here, along with some suggestions to overcome these legal roadblocks:
The Sensitivity Of Corporate Information
The first and most significant challenge faced by almost all sectors is because of the employees. The employees happen to be playing chief roles in protecting the data of the company.
There are low-tech methods used by prominent hackers to gain unauthorized access against the employees, like snooping, phishing, or social engineering.
As a result, these hackers get potential access to the corporate information of the company. These hackers will often enlist legal representation in the form of a criminal defense lawyer in Dallas, New York City, Seattle, or even a federal defense attorney depending on what the hacker did with the company’s corporate information.
Solution
To overcome such conditions, in-house data privacy compliance teams must develop security policies that cover the transmission, retention, transport, and creation of information.
In addition, data protection legal professionals must advise the business on safety tools like privacy filters to identify phishing attacks. Of course, the best way to mitigate such risks is by educating every employee.
The compliance team can help devise a program on different hacking methods and how to protect corporate data even on the personal laptop. They can also keep track of each employee’s progress during training.
Third-Party Applications
Another crucial challenge the IT sectors face is the threat caused by the continuous usage of unseen third-party solutions and applications.
The entire IT industry is advancing at an accelerated speed. It is cumbersome and complex, and hence many have started using third-party applications to complete their tasks.
But are these applications safe for regular use?
In most cases, these third-party applications possess great threats to the company’s information and data. And hence, such usage for prolonged periods can bring severe headaches to the IT department.
Solution
The legal department must set up a robust framework that prohibits or limits the use of third-party applications that can jeopardize an organization’s security.
As reiterated before, the best solution to control such a situation is to educate the end-users about such conditions.
Also, try providing the Chief Information Officers (CIOs) controlled power to assess suitability continually, thereby deploying modern enterprise cloud explanations to solve all the compliance problems.
Cloud Service Providers
Another potential challenge faced by most IT departments, as well as compliance and data protection officers, is the potential cloud service providers.
The eminent personalities of the giant companies feel that the cloud service provides have relevant access to the company’s data and information.
These services might bring significant benefits to the company. It helps the organization to save money, enhance flexibility, scalability, etc. But also, it can bring major compliance issues.
Solution
To combat such conditions, it is essential to have strict regulatory requirements to provide the ultimate protection to the data. You also need to hire the vendors only if they are SSAE 16 certified.
Data and Cyber Security Threats
The entire universe of technology is forever expanding. And with such expansion comes tough challenges like compliance complexities.
The different sectors like data protection, privacy, and even associated regulations like GDPR remain at high risk. And such misuse of personal data remains to be one of the delicate political and public issues.
Hence, the cybersecurity team needs to focus on advancing the compliance rules and regulations to provide ultimate security to its data and information.
Solution
It remains a great concern for the compliance officers to formulate the right strategies to handle such threats with time.
They aren’t the organization’s tech-heads, but they need to ensure that the cyber risks are periodically addressed within its business governance framework.
And they must remain aware of the rules from very jurisdiction with authority over the activities conducted by the respective organization.
HIPAA And HITECH
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act revolve around all data that require digitalization.
With continuous progress, and as data continues to grow in volumes, there is an increased complexity that comes with a great threat to its privacy.
HIPAA has positioned advanced emphasis on the management of the vendors associated with the company. It can directly affect healthcare CIOs’ compliance obligations.
Solution
Such compliance mandates require appropriate security and sophisticated data management approaches to provide ultimate security to the company.
As the data volumes grow, compliance officers must take appropriate measurements to increase security and meet specific security and privacy standards.
IT departments must perform appropriately to ensure they work properly with the HIPAA-compliant cloud service vendors.
So what does a chief compliance officer do in this case? Well, the officer must create the legal framework to keep the IT department in check.
BYOD
As already highlighted, this one requires special attention from almost all IT sectors. Due to multiple reasons, employees use their devices, which might create security vulnerabilities.
In many cases, such devices possess potential threats towards the company policies and its secured data.
Solution
To combat such conditions, compliance officers need to impose a strict bring-your-own-device policy, backed up by appropriate technical controls.
These devices must also maintain proper management protocols that will allow selective permission to access selected accounts remotely.
Managers can prevent data from being stolen or compromised if they strictly impose locking the devices. It is essential to set time-based OTPs, which would be authenticated appropriately.
Final Words
These are some corporate compliance issues that dominate the market. If not handled at the earliest, they can threaten company data damage an organization’s reputation in the market.
Thus, hiring professionals who are well-versed with legal matters pertaining to the IT sector is necessary for businesses today.
