Compliance obligations need not stand in the way of better information security and risk management

I couldn’t help write this post when I noticed this press release based on an IDC Insights Survey of Oil & Gas Companies. I don’t have access to the full report so I am basing my comments solely on the contents of the press release.

I found the following two findings (copied from the press release) to be of interest :

Security investments are not compliance driven.Only 10% of the respondents indicated that they are using regulatory compliance as a requirement to justify budgets.

Tough regulatory compliance and threat sophistication are the biggest barriers. Almost 25% of respondents indicated regulatory environment as a barrier to ensuring security. In addition, 20% of respondents acknowledged the increasing threat landscape.

The good news here is that only 10% of the respondents used Regulatory Compliance needs to justify budgets. What that tells me (I hope it is the case) is that the remaining 90% make budgetary decisions based solely on the information security risks that their  businesses face and not on the risks of not complying with regulations or audits. I would commend them for it… and I don’t think any good auditor (regulatory or internal/external) would have a problem with it either if the organization was able to “demonstrate” that the risk of not complying with a particular regulatory requirement was very low. Agreed.. you still need to be able to “demonstrate” which isn’t easy if one hasn’t been diligent with risk assessments.

The not-so-good news to me is the 25% number (I realize it might be low enough for some people)..  that of folks indicating that regulatory compliance is a barrier to ensuring security. For those folks, I say “It really doesn’t need to be a barrier”, not if you have good   information risk management governance and processes. I don’t know a single regulation that would force you to implement specific controls no matter what. Even if you are faced with an all-or-nothing regulation like PCI DSS, you can resort to using compensating controls (see here and here for some coverage of PCI DSS Compensating controls) to comply with a specific mandatory requirement.  To repeat my argument in the previous paragraph, an auditor would be hard-pressed to fault you if you were able to clearly articulate that you went about the compliance program  methodically by performing a risk assessment and prioritizing (by risk level) the need for specific controls required by the regulation. If you did that, you would focus on ”ensuring security” and not ignoring it for the sake of compliance.

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Kamal Govindaswamy

Posted on

July 31, 2013