As compliance costs skyrocket, standards grow increasingly complex, and the cyber threat environment evolves, organizations are turning to RegTech solutions to automate their compliance processes and improve their overall cybersecurity posture.

Compliance with regulatory and industry standards, such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, FedRAMP, and SSAE 16 SOC reporting, are a burdensome yet necessary part of doing business in the digital world. Organizations operating in highly regulated industries, such as healthcare and finance, face significant compliance challenges, especially when they must comply with multiple standards. HIPAA, for example, applies to any organization that handles medical records, including schools, collection agencies that handle medical debt, personal injury attorneys, and SaaS providers of healthcare software; meanwhile, these same organizations may also have to comply with PCI DSS, SSAE 16 reporting, SOX, and other applicable standards.

Organizations must figure out which standards apply to them, then continually keep up with reporting requirements, audits, and the inevitable changes in those standards as technology and the cyber threat environment evolve. It is estimated that regulatory compliance costs U.S. businesses about $2 trillion annually, and in a perverse twist, small businesses’ compliance costs are over three times higher than what large companies bear. This heavy burden helps explain why so many enterprise cybersecurity “plans” start and end with compliance, even though compliance does not equate to data security. It’s not necessarily that organizations don’t care about whether their data is secure, but that they spend so much money and time on compliance, there’s nothing left to tackle cybersecurity.

Fortunately, technology has made it possible for organizations to achieve compliance and secure their systems and data at an affordable cost.

RegTech to the Rescue

One of the biggest problems in many organizations is the fact that their compliance processes – or the processes of their third-party compliance providers – are not automated. Some companies still use spreadsheet programs such as Excel for compliance reporting and audits, even though Excel was never meant to be used with the very large data sets produced by today’s complex data environments. But RegTech software, such as Continuum GRC’s IT Audit Machine (ITAM), can.

While the term “RegTech” is most commonly associated with the finance industry, RegTech solutions can be employed by any organization that must adhere to compliance standards, including healthcare, cloud computing, SaaS, education, and public-sector organizations. RegTech solutions utilize big data capabilities and rapid report creation to automate data management and reporting. Instead of multiple, disparate spreadsheets and ledgers, RegTech software creates a centralized repository of all IT compliance requirements with associated controls and automated information flows for audits, assessments, and testing.

Making Sense of Big Data

The big problem with big data is that it amounts to a lot of big noise unless you have the capability to analyze it and derive actionable insight from it. RegTech doesn’t just simplify your compliance processes; it also strengthens your enterprise’s cybersecurity by providing the advanced data analysis capabilities you need to make sense of your data environment and discover where your vulnerabilities lie. The ITAM, for example, integrates IT governance, policy management, risk management, and incident management. In addition to taking the pain out of the compliance process, it empowers you to document and analyze IT risks, develop mitigation plans, define security controls, and manage ongoing risk assessments so that you can anticipate new and emerging threats and stop them before a breach occurs.

RegTech is poised to transform IT governance, compliance, and cybersecurity. Organizations that employ this new technology will free up money, time, and human resources to innovate, create, and pursue long-term organizational goals instead of being bogged down in regulatory paperwork and worried about data breaches and other cyber attacks.

The cybersecurity experts at Lazarus Alliance have deep knowledge of the cybersecurity field, are continually monitoring the latest information security threats, and are committed to protecting organizations of all sizes from security breaches. We offer full-service risk assessment services and Continuum GRC software to protect companies from data breaches, ransomware attacks, and other cyber threats.

Lazarus Alliance is proactive cybersecurity®. Call 1-888-896-7580 to discuss your organization’s cybersecurity needs and find out how we can help your organization successfully simplify Governance, Risk, and Compliance, and secure your systems.

We get it. We completely understand why you still use Excel as an assessment and audit tool. We suffered through it just the same but we believe that working smarter and not harder which is why we invented ITAM.

The IT Audit Machine (ITAM) is the patent pending, industry changing assessment questionnaire creation tool designed specifically for the governance, risk and compliance (GRC) market space but where infinite possibilities exist even outside of the GRC and cybersecurity realms due to the intelligence and simplicity of the patent pending ITAM application framework.

Typical usage includes Audit and Compliance Assessments associated with FedRAMP, PCI DSS, HIPAA, Sarbanes Oxley, ISO 27001 and all others; Risk Management Assessments associated with ISO 27005, NIST Special Publications and all others; and Governance and Policy Development to describe a few but not all possible use cases.

Excel has big limits in space, accessibility, presentation, sustainability and formatting making it a poor choice for assessment and audit work. ITAM has flipped that paradigm upside-down with Big Data management, collaborative SaaS access, theme driven aesthetics, long term analytics and trending functionality, intelligent logic and notifications and so much more.

Our GRC solutions break industry paradigms that have plagued both client organizations and service providers alike. We’d like to show you how we have taken our real-world expertise and created GRC solutions that are being touted as game-changing technology. Call Continuum GRC software solutions today at 1-888-896-7580 and schedule a demonstration.

Simply put, Excel is so old-school and ITAM is so cool-school!

Visit ContinuumGRC.com to get more information about the IT Audit Machine.

The stunning reality is that the majority of retailers accepting credit cards are still vulnerable to the newest threat to accepting credit cards from consumers. Lazarus Alliance has been years ahead with proactive cybersecurity services.

Researchers from the Cisco Security Solutions team have dubbed the latest malware to attack point-of-sales (POS) systems PoSeidon. Compromised POS systems are vulnerable to these attacks, which allow the RAM of an infected terminal to be scanned by the malware. PoSeidon looks for unencrypted credit card data and then transmits that data out to an exfiltration server controlled by the cyber criminals.

This technique has long been known to security experts. The Proactive Cybersecurity™ services at Lazarus Alliance have been years ahead of this issue by offering solutions to companies that utilize POS systems that ensure this memory scraping technique does not compromise a payment process.

William Ochs, GRC Partner of Lazarus Alliance, said, “Not only has Lazarus Alliance long called for end-to-end encryption technology to be utilized to mitigate the risk posed by POS threats, but Lazarus Alliance also has a proven track record of offering actual solutions to implement end-to-end encryption protecting retailers globally.”

As long as organizations remain reactive instead of proactive in their approach to cybersecurity, they will continue to fail the constituents they work to protect. The PoSeidon POS malware program is another example in a daunting list of the challenges that face organizations concerned with their PCI DSS stance.

As a PCI DSS audit Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) company, Lazarus Alliance has been approved by the PCI Security Standards Council (SSC) to measure an organization’s compliance to the PCI DSS audit standard. Lazarus Alliance specializes in providing our clients with scalable, efficient solutions for meeting the rigorous demands of Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance. We do this in part because of our breakthrough proprietary technologies called the IT Audit Machine (ITAM) and the Policy Machine.

“It’s incumbent upon security professionals to proactively advocate for best practices in cybersecurity, risk, and compliance; too often, the opposite occurs in the industry,” said Ochs

Learn more about Lazarus Alliance and why Lazarus Alliance is Proactive Cybersecurity™!