Being compliant with all the industry rules and regulations will help your financial or healthcare organization stay on top of the situation and reduce the risk of sales losses, legal fees, and fines, brand reputation and more. It is for this reason why compliance management should be a top priority for all IT executives.

It will grant better internal control, allowing you to determine which employees will have access to company data and what they can do with it. Similarly, it will tell them who they can share that data with internally or externally.

Also, by maintaining compliance, you will also be taking the necessary security measures to protect yourself, your organization, and your clients from security breaches. But when it comes to the healthcare and finance industries, and being compliant with all the rules and regulations, it can be somewhat of a daunting challenge.

Things like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), as well as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the future California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), just to name several, organizations need some best practices to keep them in line with everything. Here are several examples.

Involve Colleagues and Employees in the Process

Any compliance program, regardless of its thoroughness, will not be effective unless staff members are fully aware of the regulations and the impact they have on your organization. You should make it a company-wide effort to identify any gaps within the program as well as how they should be addressed.

Auditing and Monitoring

To have a successful compliance program, you need to perform internal monitoring and verification regularly. These are essential in identifying and correcting any errors that may exist or will occur. An audit may be performed once per year to look at the overall effectiveness of your compliance program. Monitoring the program, on the other hand, should be performed more frequently, such as weekly or monthly to confirm that everything is working as it should.

Automating Key Tasks and Processes

Wherever possible, tasks and processes need to be automated. Automation is a driving force across all industries as IT teams are striving to bring more agility, quality, and speed to, otherwise, manual tasks. When it comes to regulation compliance, automation will be able to accelerate this delivery significantly.

Microsoft Connected Health Platform (CHP)

The Microsoft Connected Health Platform (CHP) is a tool that provides a host of best practices and guidelines for organizations in the healthcare industry to provide many efficient, flexible, scalable and secure e-health solutions for patient engagement. Based on the principles of the Connected Health Framework (CHF), Microsoft CHP will provide many offerings for optimizing health information and communication technology.

It includes deployment guidance, prescriptive architecture, design, as well as solution accelerators. Tailored specifically for the health environment and Microsoft infrastructure models and tools, the CHP will be able to deliver and manage on-premises or cloud solutions, as part of your compliance management program.

Takeaway

Complying with all the rules and regulations is not something that should be taken lightly. Nevertheless, it's not something that cannot be achieved. Together with Managed Solution, you can make it happen.

Our Shadow IT Assessment allows you to uncover applications and tools installed on your network, and ultimately allows you to discover which of these were intentional versus accidental and authorized versus unauthorized. Our tools allow us to determine if these tools and applications are compliant and take the right next steps based on our findings. Learn more about our assessment.