Future of Compliance- Trends and developments to watch

Data Privacy & security- another factor in the current and future trends

By year-end 2024, Gartner predicts that 75% of the world’s population will have its personal data covered under modern privacy regulations and predicts that large organizations’ average annual budget for privacy will exceed $2.5 million by 2024.

Adopting and implementing some cyber security related audit standards, using standard tools, certifications etc. have become the necessity of the day instead of just adopting these for regulatory purposes.

As an example- let us examine the context of the bank card end-to-end process. The process, if examined in depth, involves not only the Bank, but involves many 3rd party service providers such as card producers, payment gateway facilitators (which may be using cloud), settlement & reconciliation related facilitators etc. As these, 3rd parties may be in one jurisdiction or involve multiple jurisdictions, it becomes necessary to have the regulations driving this universe analyzed, audited under one umbrella- this task is extremely difficult.

Compliance requirements in the current environment moving rapidly to a digitized business environment

The technology operations (involving compliance to many regulations) require tools and audit to mitigate the risks. Organizations  use Security Operations Centre (SOC), Privilege Access Management (PAM), Network Access Management (NAM), Firewalls etc. for their IT infra and warrant the engaged technology 3rd parties to have these in place to mitigate risk and regulatory compliance. Further, using ISO framework/ NIST framework etc. strengthen the organizations to strengthen their IT infra with detailed audits for gaps and controls. Certifications of these agencies help the Organization to satisfy the regulator as well as retain their existing customer base. Additionally using tools like VAPT help organizations to assess the vulnerability and penetrations by rogue players against their IT infra defences  systems.

Data aggregation, data management, data analytics, data security etc. have assumed significant levels – although primarily one looks at these from an Operational risk perspective (which includes compliance risk), one requires to understand that above mentioned data related aspects accompany a lot of regulatory/global standards compliance requirements.

Some examples to address the above concerns on data/ information are say PCIDSS (on card data) HIPPA (for health records/ data of patients), GDPR (for personal data protections) etc. which are standards used globally.

QRC Services:

QRC Assurance and Solutions as an organization has worked extensively on addressing issues emerging from the current and future compliance requirements. Some of the audits/ tools provided by QRC Assurance and Solutions include:

- PCIDSS (Card Holder Data), HIPPA (ePHI), GDPR (PII) appropriately for Organizations to assess and address the gaps resulting from data security and privacy related at the People, Process and Technology of the organization as well as any engaged 3rd party providers.

- Conduct Audits on prescribed data security/ privacy standards by various regulators such as RBI, NABARD, IRDA, UIDAI, SEBI, SWIFT etc.

- Perform Vulnerability and Penetration Testing Scans using various techniques including Black box, Grey Box, White Box Testing.

- Perform configurations audits to assess the technology and systems related gaps.

QRC Assurance and Solutions offers QRCAssist, a centralized platform that provides effective compliance management System and Self-Assessment tool (SAT) to organizations to help them evaluate/ assess their status of Compliance vis-à-vis various standards/ regulations.