Compliance Operations

How to Implement Compliance Operations Principles With Hyperproof

Now, here’s how you can operationalize these compliance operations principles step by step with Hyperproof. Each of the five steps builds on top of the previous one.

1. Get Everything Into a Single Place

Breaking down information silos so that risks and the state of the existing internal controls are well understood has to be the first step if an organization wants to manage IT risks in an agile, proactive way. Hyperproof serves as the single source of truth for all of your risks and compliance activities, including documentation of controls, evidence (or compliance artifacts), and records of audits.

Typically, organizations start using Hyperproof by populating an existing template.

Out of the box, Hyperproof provides a set of illustrative controls for many of the most commonly used security and privacy frameworks, including NIST-CSF, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001 and many others. These starter controls are linked to program requirements (or security objectives), providing a quick start approach for many organizations. For organizations who already have existing controls in place, it’s quite simple to edit the provided controls, add new controls, and remove superfluous ones.

By using Hyperproof, it’s easy to keep track of what controls are already implemented and operational, versus which ones are missing – so additional work can be identified and assigned to the responsible parties.

Once you select a specific template, you can immediately start uploading your evidence into the system and link them to the controls.

You can also track your risks in Hyperproof in a risk register. Each risk can be mapped back to controls in Hyperproof — so you can understand how risks are mitigated with existing controls and what the residual risk is.

2. Define the Responsible Parties and Their Roles and Responsibilities

Hyperproof makes it easy to define clear processes, roles, and responsibilities and monitor how key functions are performing, so you’re able to avoid compliance slip-ups, control deficiencies, and failing audit results.

Assign control ownership: One of the most common causes of IT system failures and compliance lapses is that companies aren’t keeping controls up-to-date. The real problem starts upstream: When no one in the company knows who is responsible for maintaining specific controls. Hyperproof lets you assign controls to individuals or teams and re-assign a control when there’s a change in personnel. This visibility into “who is responsible for what” is essential for staying on top of your compliance obligations.

Define cadences for control monitoring: To minimize IT risks, controls need to be critically observed, monitored, and reviewed on an ongoing basis. However, this task is extremely difficult to accomplish if you don’t have the appropriate technology that automates the work. In Hyperproof, you can define cadences to review controls and set due dates. Then, the system takes over the job of reminding people to get their work done.

3. Streamline Your Evidence Management Workflows

With Hyperproof, you can build an organized and highly efficient evidence collection and review process and ensure it stays that way. Here is how our software supports this:

Evidence mapping: Evidence can be quickly uploaded and linked to controls. It’s easy to preview evidence in the platform to see.

Keep evidence up-to-date: No one likes bothering their colleagues with multiple requests for the same documents. Yet, this happens all the time within compliance teams. With Hyperproof, you can set up automated reminders to remind teammates to upload new evidence periodically and spend your time on better things.

Re-use evidence across multiple audits and compliance programs: With Hyperproof serving as a central repository for evidence, you can easily find evidence you’d leveraged for previous audits and identify documents you can re-use. Additionally, with Hyperproof’s “Labels” — containers for storing specific types of compliance artifacts — you can collect compliance artifacts and tie them to multiple controls. When you upload a new evidence file onto a label, that evidence is automatically reflected across all linked controls.

Automate evidence collection: You can cut the time spent on evidence collection by half using Hyperproof’s Live Sync Feature, Zapier, or the Hyperproof Organizational API to automate evidence collection workflows. You can also set up automated workflows to remind colleagues to upload new evidence so you can spend your time on higher impact tasks.

4. Free Up Time By Reducing Friction Points From Collaboration Processes

In the security assurance and compliance realm, getting work done requires ongoing collaboration between those inside and outside of the security assurance and compliance functions and between those inside and outside of an organization. To operate efficiently, compliance teams need tools in which they can easily assign tasks, track the completion of those tasks, and communicate with parties involved in those tasks. It’s also important to minimize switching back and forth between multiple tools. If these conditions aren’t met, it’s all too easy for individuals to drop the ball. With Hyperproof, you can:

Assign tasks and communicate seamlessly: Hyperproof comes with a native Task Management System, and it works seamlessly with existing project management systems including Jira, Confluence, and Asana. Compliance managers can create new tasks in Hyperproof and control owners can continue to use their preferred tool of choice to complete the tasks.

You’re able to receive notifications about your tasks in several ways, either in Hyperproof or through existing chat tools or via email. If you connect your chat tool (e.g. Slack or Microsoft teams) to Hyperproof, your stakeholders can receive notifications of requests from Hyperproof in those apps, respond to requests directly and those responses will automatically be routed back into Hyperproof.

Start new virtual meetings and store meeting recordings automatically as proof: Sometimes, to prove that you meet a compliance requirement (or that a control is effective), you need to show that a meeting happened. Hyperproof has made it incredibly easy to collect this particular type of proof: It comes with a native integration to Zoom. You can start a Zoom meeting from any Control in Hyperproof, and the meeting recording will be automatically attached to the control as Proof.

Collaborate with your auditors: To get ready for an external audit, a compliance manager may spend several days simply pulling together documents for their auditor. With Hyperproof as your compliance operations command center, your auditor can see complete document version history, understand what you’ve done, and how evidence has changed over time. This reduces the back and forth you’d normally have with your auditor, saving everyone time and money.

5. Monitor, Measure, and Iterate to Maintain Continuous Compliance

New IT risks can be introduced by internal operational changes or unexpected circumstances. To protect your organization, your security assurance and compliance teams need to understand how internal and external factors introduce new risks, amplify existing risks, and evolve the control environment to keep risks in check.

With Hyperproof’s dashboards and reports, you can stay on top of risks and your control environment at all times and iteratively evolve and mature your risk management and compliance management practices.

Automate Controls Monitoring: You can define cadences to review controls and set due dates. Hyperproof will automatically alert control owners when they need to provide fresh evidence to verify the efficacy of controls. Control owners are able to define how they want to assess the health of controls; once this is configured, Hyperproof will automatically flag controls that require human attention.

Identify, Assess, and Prioritize Risks: Keeping track of your organization’s risks in a central registry is crucial for creating appropriate risk treatment plans. With Hyperproof’s intuitive Risk Registry, risk owners from all functions and business units can document their risks and risk treatment plans and organizational leaders can better prioritize risk management activities.

Understand Residual Risk: To ensure that risk managers focus their attention on the right areas, an organization needs to know which risks are most likely to occur and have the highest potential impact. With Hyperproof, once you’ve documented a risk, you can link a specific control to a risk and determine how much a specific risk has been mitigated by an existing control. With this information, your team can focus their energy on the issues that truly require attention.

Track Risks Over Time: Risks can be exacerbated by new circumstances and controls may become obsolete over time. As such, you need metrics and reports to stay on top of how risks trend over time. With Hyperproof, you can see how your risks change over time and deploy timely responses to keep risks in check.