What you need to know about Cloud Compliance & Compliance Reporting Table of Content 1. Why does Compliance matter in the Cloud? 2. How to achieve Cloud Compliance? 3. How do you access Cloud Compliance? 4. Why is Compliance Reporting important? 5. What makes Compliance Reporting effective? 6. Final thoughts According to Gartner, Inc.'s latest forecast, the global end-user spending on public cloud services would surpass $482 billion in 2022. More companies are moving to the cloud to reduce costs and improve business resilience and agility. Because of this, they naturally want to understand more about cloud compliance and compliance reporting. Cloud compliance involves complying with laws and regulations of using the cloud. Compliance reporting refers to report documents that indicate whether the company is complying with regulations that apply to their business or not. Now let's discuss the details of cloud compliance and compliance reporting. Why does Compliance matter in the Cloud? Many national/local laws and industry regulations have emerged around protecting data security and consumer privacy. It means that organizations need to protect customers’ privacy or data or risk facing the law. Your company needs to comply with different rules and regulations depending on your industry, such as GDPR, SOX, PCI DSS, or HIPAA. Compliance matters a lot in the cloud as it ensures your workflows, processes, and systems match the requirements of these regulatory regiments. Any data stored in the cloud infrastructure should comply with relevant data privacy and protection laws. Non-compliance can result in possible lawsuits and hefty fines. You may also have a bad reputation among your customers, which will affect your profitability and revenue. Read More: Azure Vs Aws - What To Choose Between Two Strong Cloud Platforms? How to achieve Cloud Compliance? Organizations can achieve cloud compliance by implementing proper security controls that match the laws that apply to their business. Different laws have specific rules on how companies collect, process, and store data in the cloud. Companies need to work with cloud providers to ensure compliance by creating strong controls. Many providers offer compliance resources, offerings, security protocols, and audit reports to support the compliance goals of different businesses. Upon implementing security controls, you How do you access Cloud Compliance? Once the necessary controls to achieve compliance are in place, you need to evaluate your compliance posture regularly. It is a crucial step to continue maintaining compliance. Conducting an internal or external audit is one way of assessing compliance. An internal audit, also known as self-assessment, can help boost your compliance posture as it can yield valuable results. But these audits can be biased because internal auditors do them. For unbiased assessment, you need to look for an independent third-party auditor to do an external audit to assess your cloud compliance posture. Earlier, we saw that you must comply with appropriate data privacy laws as a cloud user. Your cloud provider should also adhere to the set laws. Request them to give you a compliance audit report to ensure they align with your compliance processes and goals. For example, you can request for SOC 2 audit report to know whether the provider has implemented security controls to ensure user privacy and data security. Why is Compliance Reporting important? Compliance reporting is vital for many reasons, with the main one being they are needed by regulatory obligation. For example, product manufacturers need to file reports with the relevant industry regulators to comply with product safety rules. It is a way of knowing the effectiveness of your current compliance program and determining the required actions. A compliance report identifies areas where compliance initiatives are adhered to successfully and where you should put more effort to meet the set standards, internal controls, or regulations. If you don't generate a compliance report, your business could face serious legal problems. Ensure your compliance report is up to date because clients may want to see it to understand your compliance procedures before doing business with you. A detailed compliance report will show your clients that your controls and operations are trustworthy. Every organization wants to have an accurate and clear picture of how its business is performing. This is especially so when reviewing processes overseen by regulatory bodies. For stakeholders and business owners, compliance reports help eliminate stress because they don't have to worry if their operations comply with the law. Besides, if there are any problems, the report will help identify and correct them before they become too big to handle. One Stop Solution for Custom Software Development? Enquire Today. See here What makes Compliance Reporting effective? Effective compliance reporting involves making reports that readers can resonate with. Most compliance reports go to board directors and senior executives. Even though they may have an idea of the concept around regulatory compliance, they may not know the terms used internally by compliance officers. A compliance report needs to be written well for readers to understand it and put it into good use. All compliance reports need an executive summary, necessary actions from the board or executive, and a list of timelines for improvement. Digital compliance reporting can help to speed up the process and make it more accurate and efficient. This is essential because creating a compliance report is labor-intensive and lengthy. It can take even days to compile the needed regulatory compliance reporting. Automating the process will make it easy to generate analytics regularly to provide valuable business insights. Final thoughts There is no doubt that cloud adoption brings many advantages for companies. However, it comes with its challenges which can be overwhelming. To reduce these challenges, ensure you know the laws you should comply with, how, and why. Also, embracing a cloud solution for analytics and reporting enables business owners to focus on their business and not the infrastructure needed to run it. Compliance reporting helps businesses identify the best security controls to protect client data and privacy. In an ideal world, compliance reports must follow pre-designed templates and use the predetermined metrics to capture data. That way, it will be easy to present reports quickly and clearly. Don't automate recommendations to improve the weak areas in your compliance program. Such things are better left to human judgment.