Compliance Fatigue Is Real—And It’s Putting Cybersecurity at Risk

Adhering to the ever-tightening letter of the law is the cost of doing business these days, and for many companies caught in the crosshairs, that cost is getting too high.

New research by Bridewell Consulting revealed that 44% of all financial services institutions in the UK listed compliance as the top cybersecurity challenge their organizations currently face. And it may be no surprise as many financial institutions do business in other countries, making them subject to not only UK-based cybersecurity law but those established around the world.

The troubling part is that compliance policy is meant to bolster cybersecurity, not undercut it. However, with too heavy a burden on ticking the boxes, it could be acting as a millstone instead.

Consequence of Compliance Fatigue

When inundated with a lot of Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) documentation, it can all start to blur. Compliance fatigue is the result of such overwhelm and can ironically jeopardize security measures at the helm. For instance, a constant, all-consuming emphasis on compliance policy can have the following unintended results:

1. Delayed patching and vulnerability management | When looming audit deadlines become the immediate need, proactive defense measures like patching and vulnerability management can fall by the wayside.
2. Weakened incident response readiness | Rapid incident response demands availability and a hairpin trigger. When the bulk of your SOC is allocated to compliance duties, the number left on hand for response is drastically reduced.

The same can be said for security monitoring outside the typical in-house scope; I.e. third parties. Thankfully, third-party oversight is something that is increasingly part of compliance policy frameworks, or at least their updated versions.

Keeping Up with Compliance

Let’s look at just some of the compliance mandates applicable to UK financial firms, whether at home or abroad.

• UK’s Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018) | These guidelines amount to the equivalent of the EU’s GDPR in the UK and set forth data privacy laws that must be followed by all sectors, including the UK’s financial services sector.
• UK’s Cyber Security and Resilience Bill | This latest update to the DPA 2018 expands the scope to even more critical and important entities and clarifies mandatory reporting requirements necessary for compliance.
• UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) | This UK-based regulatory body released new guidelines for governing supply chain risk in January of this year.
• UK’s Operational Resilience Framework | Instituted in March of this year, the Operational Resilience Framework requires financial firms to identify and mitigate the impact of an operational disruption.
• EU’s DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) | While this is an EU-based policy, over 440 UK-based financial institutions have either relocated to or increased their presence in Europe. DORA, entering into force this past January, will directly impact them.

This list is not comprehensive; other frameworks like NIS2, AML/CTF regulations, and more widely apply as well. In a mad dash to put new and future-ready policies into place, UK lawmakers have unwittingly put a significant strain on many UK-based financial firms, who now find maintaining an above-board status one of the most difficult parts of their job.

With so many compliance tick boxes and so little time, what can companies do to adhere without making adherence their full-time job? Resources are scarce, compliance-educated employees are hard to come by, and the public is as relentless in its punishment of privacy lawbreakers as threat actors are in finding them. How can today’s organizations meet tightening security standards while still staying afloat?

When you can’t work harder, you can work smarter. Compliance policy can largely be put on autopilot with the right AI-driven, automation-driving security tools. The trick is to first understand the problem, then find the pain points that reveal the solution.

Automating Security Compliance with Fortra

Today’s compliance landscape is getting too difficult for organizations to navigate alone. Fortra Integrity and Compliance Monitoring uses automated solutions to simplify the everyday tasks that make up continuous compliance.

With the right tools in place, you can prevent compliance-jeopardizing factors like configuration drift, unauthorized file changes, unsecure file transfer, poor reporting practices, and data loss in compliance-driven industries. Fortra offers cybersecurity and compliance solutions that simplify the essential tasks necessary to an audit-proof infrastructure, including:

• Fortra Cloud Email Protection: Reduce the risk of employees losing data via risky email threats like phishing or Business Email Compromise (BEC) and catch malware before it hits your inbox.
• Fortra Data Loss Prevention (DLP): SaaS-based, market leading DLP helps you discover, monitor, and protect sensitive data, ensuring it stays within compliance boundaries.
• Fortra Data Classification: Classify and label information by sensitivity level so both structured data (like documents) and unstructured data (like images) are protected per data privacy guidelines.
• Fortra Integrity & Compliance Monitoring: Automatically detect suspicious file and network changes while hardening your system through security misconfiguration management (SCM).

Fortra has specific solutions to help you comply with data privacy regulations across the board, including HIPAA, SOX, GDPR, PCI DSS, and more. And with Fortra Managed Services, your SOC can lean on professional help throughout any upcoming compliance policy changes and ride the wave with expert advice as policies continue to evolve.

New and improving compliance standards certainly represent a step in the right direction, especially for highly targeted sectors like finance. However, they are only as good as they are followed. Investing in automated, AI-driven solutions can help maintain compliant policies and unburden UK financial firms as they strive to secure their sensitive assets, both in real life and on paper.

Discover how Fortra helped Alliant Credit Union reduce manual cycles in achieving PCI DSS compliance.