What is Compliance Automation? - Complete Guide

In today’s complex business environment, compliance management, spanning data protection to industry standards, is increasingly challenging. Compliance automation simplifies the compliance process through automation technology, aiding companies in managing regulations, reducing risks, and boosting efficiency.

At the same time, mobile device management also plays an important role, especially when dealing with compliance issues related to mobile devices. Let's learn more about compliance automation through this post!

Part 1. What is Compliance Automation?

What is it?

In simple terms, compliance automation refers to using automated tools and technologies to manage and ensure that businesses adhere to laws, regulations, industry standards, and internal policies.

By automating compliance-related tasks such as data monitoring, record-keeping, and report generation. Compliance Automation reduces the likelihood of human error, ensures compliance in corporate operations, and also improves work efficiency while saving time and resources.

Key Features

Real-time Monitoring & Reporting: It can describe how the system can help enterprises monitor compliance in real-time and generate automated reports.

Automated Risk Management: It can describe how to identify, analyze and manage risks through automation technology.

Docs Management & Archiving: It mentions how automated systems can efficiently manage compliance docs and ensuring they meet regulatory requirements.

Part 2. Components of Compliance Automation

Before you can start using compliance automation in your business, you first need to understand the steps you will need to carry out. Generally, implementing compliance automation requires implementing the following components one by one:

1Testing

Whenever you are implementing a compliance automation software in your business, it needs to be tested first. Doing this will ensure that your compliance automation software can withstand your business requirements. It will also evaluate your requirements as needed by your business.

2Policies & Procedures

Since a compliance automation software only implements existing compliance standards, you need to provide it with standardized and easy to understand policies and procedures. These policies should suit your business and any external compliance requirements as well.

3Software & Tools

The whole point of implementing compliance automation is that it helps your business to automate all of its compliance policies instead of manual ones. So, choosing the right software and tools for the same is quite important.

4Continuous Review

Once you have implemented a compliance automation tool in your business, you also need to review and update it in the future. This is to ensure that your compliance automation stays functional even with future compliance requirements as you expand your business.

Part 3. Why Do Enterprises Need Compliance Automation?

1. Continuous Compliance

As your business will grow over the years and your requirements will change as well, compliance automation is a continuous process. You need to include future tasks and procedures in your compliance automation program over time as well.

2. Better & Efficient Compliance

The whole point of using compliance automation software is that it helps you save time. Since you are not relying on manual efforts for compliance automation, your manpower can be used elsewhere which makes your business more efficient.

3. Track Down Information Faster

One of the biggest benefits of compliance automation is that it can easily handle large amounts of data. All of your business data can be accessed from one place which saves time and increased data accuracy as well.

4. Less Duplicative Effort with Scaled Compliance

In large scale businesses, it is quite common to accidentally have multiple people working on the same thing. Fortunately, compliance automation prevents this by automating the whole process by using a single software program.

5. Multiple System Integration

Even if your business uses multiple tools and departments, all of them can come under one roof with the right compliance automation software. This is done by using a centralized compliance implementation method.

Part 4. Challenges of Compliance Automation Facing, How to Conquer Them?

Although compliance automation brings lots of benefits, with the popularity of remote work and mobile office, corporate mobile devices (such as smartphones, tablets and laptops) have become important tools for data storage and business operations. But these devices also bring new compliance risks, such as data leakage, device loss and application non-compliance.

However, overcoming these challenges is indeed feasible, and mobile device management (MDM) can play a pivotal role in this regard. Let's explore how MDM can effectively address these issues and enhance compliance automation.

1Complex Regulatory Environment:

Enterprises face constantly changing global regulation, such as GDPR and HIPAA, making it challenging to ensure that all devices and data consistently comply with compliance requirements.

How MDM Can Help:

MDM can remotely configure device policies to ensure compliance with local or global regulations. When regulations change, MDM can update the configurations of all devices to align with the new requirements, ensuring compliance in any jurisdiction.

2Eliminating Data Silos:

Compliance data may be dispersed across different devices and systems, creating challenges for management and auditing.

How MDM Can Help:

MDM centralizes data access and application usage across all corporate mobile devices. It provides a unified view that enables real-time monitoring of device compliance status, reducing data silos.

3Technical Implementation Challenges:

The deployment and maintenance of compliance automation systems can be complex, especially when multiple departments are involved.

How MDM Can Help:

MDM systems typically offer excellent scalability and integration capabilities, enabling seamless integration with existing compliance automation tools. Through MDM, IT teams can remotely configure and manage all devices, simplifying the implementation of compliance automation systems and reducing manual operations and technical complexity.

4Cybersecurity Threats:

Compliance automation systems may face cybersecurity threats; if the system is attacked or vulnerabilities are not promptly addressed, it could lead to compliance issues.

How MDM Can Help:

MDM helps prevent mobile devices from becoming entry points for cyber attacks by enforcing security policies on device, such as data encryption and remote wipe. MDM can automatically push application updates to devices, ensuring they always run on the latest, secure versions, reducing security and compliance risks.

Part 5. Working Principle of Compliance Automation Explained

Now that you know the key components of compliance automation, let’s understand its working principle as well.

The working principle of compliance automation involves leveraging technology to automatically gather and integrate various types of data within an organization, then comparing and analyzing this data against relevant regulations and internal policies.

The system continuously monitors daily activities, identifies potential risks, and implements compliance controls in real-time, such as access restrictions and transaction monitoring. If any anomalies or violations are detected, the system immediately triggers a response mechanism, notifying the relevant personnel and executing predefined corrective actions.

Additionally, compliance automation includes automated audit and reporting functions, allowing for continuous monitoring of the organization's compliance status and providing real-time compliance reports and analyses.

This not only simplifies the complexity of compliance management but also enables quicker adaptation to regulatory changes, ensuring that the organization remains compliant while reducing the risk of human error.

Part 6. Regulatory Compliance Automation and Its Uses

Since compliance automation is important and required in so many ways, it is used in all sorts of businesses and sectors. Some of the common uses of compliance automation in
cludes:

1Medical

As you would expect, all medical equipment and institutions need to adhere to various strict compliances like the ones issued under HIPAA or Health insurance Portability & Accountability Act. Thus, using compliance automation for the same can make the same much easier.

2Government

All government agencies are also required to handle information and data according to FISMA or Federal Information Security Management Act. So, by implementing a compliance automation software, you can easily protect sensitive information while increasing efficiency.

3Retail

Since retail businesses handle a large amount of data including inventory details, billing details, payment details, and much more, all of these can be efficiently and easily handled using compliance automation.

4Hospitality

Last but not least, hospitality businesses like hotels and restaurants also deal with large amounts of customer data similar to retail businesses. Hence, if you are in the hospitality business, you should definitely implement compliance automation for the same.

Compliance Automation: A Conclusion

Even if you are a medium sized business, handling large amounts of data and complying with standard business compliances can become quite hectic. Thus, you should definitely implement compliance automation using the right software programs like MDM. This results in various benefits like improved efficiency, versatile compatibility, and much more which makes compliance automation a must have.