Compliance frameworks like those from NIST and ISO can provide useful guidance for assessing security provisions, and they can be highly effective as starting points for formulating your company’s strategies. Obtaining certifications from these compliance organizations can also signal your commitment to data protection and privacy, and align your organization with ethical behavior and social responsibility. Potential customers and partners are likely to check your compliance badges, which is why so many companies display them prominently.
But an over-reliance on compliance can be a vulnerability, not an asset. Prioritizing compliance checklists can direct your focus away from innovation and growth, and create a false sense of security that might cause you to miss critical threats.
This is why security experts and thought leaders often encourage organizations to switch gears and adopt a more flexible, effective approach that is based on risks, rather than compliance.
The Potential Pitfalls of Compliance-First
Too often, compliance is little more than an exercise in checklist adherence, carried out after cyber processes and workflows are already established, simply to meet the requirements of a given standard. Recent breaches have highlighted the drawbacks of this approach.
According to experts, this is a reminder that “financial institutions and their partners must move beyond compliance and tick-box exercises, fostering an active security consciousness that encourages positive security behaviors.”
Dangerously, a compliance-first mindset looks at risks in a fragmented manner, which can lead to gaps in security provisions. Some threats only become apparent when viewed in the context of the whole system.
Compliance frameworks also offer baseline and generic standards – not the highest standards and not the standards that make the most sense given the specifics of individual organizations. Indeed, companies that stick narrowly to compliance checklists might be led towards solutions that don’t protect against specific risks, or which don’t reflect their high exposure to risks from a vector that is specific to their industry.
Equally problematically, a compliance-first approach can lead organizations to expend resources on risks that are relatively low for their circumstances. When decision-making prioritizes compliance over other factors, it creates a bureaucratic monster that squashes gro
