March 07
Due to ever-evolving security risks, it’s crucial to update your security plan to account for new threats.
In this blog, we’re going to discuss the true cost of not having compliance in place and some key aspects that should be covered on your organization’s cloud compliance checklist:
What Is the Cost of Not Having Compliance in Place?
Fines
Depending on where you are in the world, your organization may have certain cloud compliance responsibilities. For example, the GDPR covers the European Union and has a list of their fines if a business does not comply with their requirements.
Cybersecurity Incidents
Without cloud compliance, your organization is also more likely to have to deal with cybersecurity incidents.
Cybersecurity Ventures anticipates that there will be an annual global cybercrime total of $10.5 trillion USD by 2025, which is an anticipated 15% annual growth for the next five years. While the 2021 statistics are already staggering, — an estimated $6 trillion USD — they’re only expected to increase, which makes complying with regulations more important than ever.
Reputation Risks
In addition to the hefty legal fees or compliance fines your company may be subject to, your reputation may be at stake without effective cloud compliance.
If you suffer downtime, a significant loss of data, or a similar issue, many current and potential customers may question your organization’s security.
Lengthy Data Restoration Period
In the third quarter of 2021, the average length of downtime for a business following a ransomware attack was 22 days.
In addition to that, it has been estimated that nearly 60% of small businesses who are victim to a cyberattack will close within 6 months.
What Should My Organization’s Compliance Checklist Look Like?
In order to avoid dealing with these concerns, your company can take precautions to avoid security risks, including creating and following a compliance checklist.
While this list is in no way exhaustive, here are five key areas that should be included in your organization’s 2022 cloud compliance checklist:
Compliance Management
Be sure to include any compliance requirements within your cloud compliance checklist.
Depending on your organization’s industry and location, this area of your compliance checklist will look a little different. You should be aware of any policies you need to follow, including: HIPAA, HiTech, PCI, SOC 2, FINRA, FedRAMP, GDPR, and similar organizations.
New Technology
Technology is advancing rapidly, so compliance policies aren’t always up-to-date on every piece of technology you may be using.
For example, many regulations were made before containerization was commonplace, so it’s important to ensure that your compliance checklist covers any new technology that your organization is using.
User Access
It’s always crucial to set time limits and strict requirements on passwords for your users, but it’s also important to review those requirements themselves. Some areas you should review include:
- Password requirements (i.e. length or special characters).
- Password expiration lengths (i.e. 30 days).
- Multi-factor authentication requirements (i.e. requiring a secondary code or passphrase to access data).
By taking a look at user access, you can make sure unauthorized people don’t gain access to your organization’s sensitive information.
Disaster Recovery
To ensure your organization is utilizing a safe and effective environment, you should also have a disaster recovery plan in place.
You should consider a number of factors for your plan, including:
- Your data integrity after a natural or human-made disaster.
- Your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
- The amount of loss your organization can withstand.
It’s also important to ensure everyone knows their role in the disaster recovery plan. In a situation when it needs to be rolled out, everyone can be prepared to move quickly and get the organization back on track as quickly as possible.
Encryption
By making sure the files in your cloud environment are encrypted, you can prevent some cybersecurity risks.
Even if there is a breach, any encrypted data will be inaccessible without the encryption codes, making it harder for attackers to access certain information.
