5 Ways to Build A Culture of Security and Compliance
For cloud service organizations that want to stand out in a crowded market, demonstrating your commitment to cybersecurity and compliance is paramount. But while a strong security posture starts at the top, all members of an organization must buy in to ensure continuous compliance and keep the company on the path toward long-term cyber resilience.
By building cybersecurity and compliance best practices into your company culture from the ground up, your organization will be better prepared to:
Respond to new and existing cyber threats;
Achieve or maintain compliance against security frameworks and regulations like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA; and,
Build trust with customers, partners, and stakeholders, who want to feel confident their data is safe with you.
Here are five ways to build a culture of security and compliance within your organization:
1. Define accountability.
The first step to building a successful culture of security and compliance in any organization is to define accountability. The buck stops at the C-suite. Top-level leaders should be involved in all major security decisions; after all, they have the best view of the organization as a whole and can consider factors like current resources, budget limitations, and long-term company goals.
While the company’s top executives are ultimately responsible for ensuring a secure environment, leaders like CEOs and CISOs can build out security teams and delegate responsibilities such as:
Risk assessments and risk management
Internal security training
Preparing for audits and compliance assessments like SOC 2
Monitoring for continuous compliance
Managing external security consultants
Identity and access management
Security and compliance budgeting
Day-to-day security operations
Regardless of how you divvy up these tasks, it’s critical for each individual within your security team to know what they are responsible for and how that is measured. Security leaders should work with their teams to define key performance indicators (KPIs) that are specific, actionable, and practical for the business. For instance, a single data point, like the current number of open vulnerabilities within an environment, doesn’t tell the whole story—but measuring the percent of vulnerabilities that are patched or elevated within a certain time period provides a clearer picture of how efficiently issues are being handled. Examining your security KPIs on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis can help your team identify priorities and be more proactive about achieving and maintaining compliance.
2. Implement regular, role-based security awareness training.
For security and compliance to truly be part of your organization’s internal culture, even employees who aren’t on your security team must have a thorough understanding of the roles they play in keeping your stakeholders’ data secure. It’s not enough to distribute a quick company-wide training video once per year. In order to be effective, security training should be regular, relevant, and engaging. To accomplish this, business leaders should aim to develop training programs that are tailored to each individual role or department within the organization. While all employees with access to a computer should undergo some type of cybersecurity training, some team members might only need basic security education that covers topics like phishing and password management. For employees who interact with or have access to sensitive information as part of their day-to-day roles, much more in-depth security training should be required.
This doesn’t just help keep your company better protected from cybersecurity threats; it also helps you ensure continuous compliance with industry regulations. For instance, organizations within the U.S. that process, transmit, or store protected health information (PHI) must comply with HIPAA. Employees who have access to PHI should receive specialized training on how to manage and protect that data in compliance with the law. Other employees who may require specialized security training include those who work in finance and human resources (HR), as members of these departments are often the targets of cyberattacks because of their broad access to private data.
Once you’ve launched your internal security training program, the next step is selling it to your team. Instilling a culture of security within an organization requires everyone’s buy-in. Consider asking the security team to work closely with your company’s marketing department to devise a plan for explaining the importance of your security initiatives and encouraging company-wide participation.
Above all, remember that security education isn’t a “set it and forget it” task. In a constantly changing field like cybersecurity, organizational leaders should strive to foster cultures that embrace continuous learning and development. In addition to establishing a regular cadence for formal security training, you might consider encouraging your team to attend cybersecurity and compliance conferences or read industry publications and set up a time to discuss what they’ve learned. This will help keep security and compliance top-of-mind year-round—even when you’re not in the midst of an audit.
3. Budget for security and compliance.
If you’ve curated a top-notch cybersecurity team, it’s likely that they have already developed strategies and ideas for improving your organization’s security posture—but they can’t implement those big ideas without sufficient resources. Business leaders who want to build a culture of security and compliance within their organizations must understand that good security practices can’t always be measured in terms of return on investment; instead, they’re a necessary cost of doing business.
When budgeting for cybersecurity and compliance, consider the resources that you will need to allocate to:
Company-wide security awareness training
Identity and access management tools
Vendor risk management
Risk assessments
External consulting
Compliance auditing and automation tools
While these costs can quickly add up, keep in mind that the immediate and long-term effects of a data breach can be much more expensive. According to IBM, the average cost of a data breach in 2023 was $4.45 million, up 15% over 2020—and that doesn’t include the cost of recovering data that was lost. By investing in security and compliance now, you’ll save your organization’s money, time, and reputation in the long run.
4. Bake security and compliance into your processes from the ground up.
Especially for fast-growing start-ups, it’s easy to put security and compliance on the back burner—but that’s the quickest way to accrue technical debt. Technical debt adds up when you delay taking an action that would save your team time down the line, like fixing a lingering glitch or documenting a complicated process. For example, failing to consider security best practices and compliance regulations during the design phase of a new software development project could result in your team having to spend much more time later on designing and implementing the proper controls. It’s not always possible to completely avoid creating technical debt, but by baking security and compliance into your company culture by educating your team, defining accountability, and allocating sufficient resources, you’re less likely to build up large amounts of technical debt, and tackling it becomes a lot more manageable.
5. Take advantage of automation tools to ensure continuous security and compliance.
For security practitioners across industries, automation tools have been a game-changer in managing and maintaining compliance. With compliance automation tools like Audora, security teams can work with auditors asynchronously, allowing them to view their progress in real time and make changes as needed to strengthen the organization’s security posture. By streamlining communication and evidence collection, Audora allows security teams to spend more time focusing on big-picture issues, marketing their security initiatives internally, and planning for new developments in security and compliance.
Automation tools can also be useful for organizations aiming to use compliance as a differentiator. Achieving compliance against multiple security frameworks helps solidify to customers and stakeholders that you’ve baked security best practices into your company culture. Tools like Audora streamline that process by allowing auditors to map controls to multiple standards, making it easier to complete multiple cybersecurity assessments concurrently or simultaneously. This saves your team time that could be spent on internal initiatives to improve your overall security culture.
The Bottom Line
Building a culture of security within your organization comes down to two main factors: people and processes. To set your organization up for success, make sure to allocate sufficient budget and resources, define accountability early on, and establish measurable security KPIs that allow you and your team to gauge your progress over time. But don’t just limit your efforts to your security team. To truly build a culture of security from top to bottom, employees in all departments and at all levels should undergo regular, engaging security training so they understand their roles in keeping private data secured. This will not only put your organization in a better position to achieve and maintain compliance, but will also help you build trust with customers and stakeholders, who can feel confident that your team puts security first.
Audora puts achieving compliance within reach for organizations of all sizes. Book a demo today to learn more.
