Five Ways to Reduce Your IT Audit Tax
Most organizations spend 30-50% more on compliance than they should 1. No matter the industry, with regulations such as GLBA, PCI, FISMA, SOX, and other regulations and mandates, it seems nobody is immune to scrutiny - but why spend so much more than what is necessary? In order to reduce the burden of an IT audit, you must understand the costs involved to demonstrate due care, which can be almost as harrowing as the fines and litigation costs for non-compliance.
If your organization continues to rely on ad hoc, manual and disjointed compliance and audit processes - which is the norm in many health care organizations today - you can be sure that your IT audits will be expensive and inefficient. Recent research has noted that organizations struggle with as many as 40,000 spreadsheets for just one compliance purpose(2). If you must support multiple regulations, mandates and internal policies, the amount of spreadsheets will surely get out of hand, ensuring inaccuracies and forcing you to rely upon costly third party consultants.
The good news is that compliance can be achieved effectively and efficiently and in this white paper you will learn five key methods to streamline your compliance efforts and reduce your IT audit burden.
- Take a top down approach to compliance
- Harmonize multiple compliance efforts
- Automate compliance data gathering
- Apply compliance best practices
- Learn to deliver the right compliance reports
1 - IT Policy Compliance, Managing Spend on Information Security and Audit for Better Results, February 2009
2 - Corporate Integrity, LLC, Foundations of GRC: Streamlining Compliance, May 2009
