Don’t Force Your Complex Compliance Program to Fit Someone Else’s Software

There’s a special kind of torture that involves trying to force your complex compliance program into a rigid piece of one-size-fits-all compliance software. At some point, you realize you’re spending more time building and maintaining manual workarounds just to bridge the gaps between your desired approach and the capabilities of rigid compliance tooling.

Many compliance platforms were built with a best-case scenario in mind — a single standard, a single office, and a single compliance manager who does things precisely the way the tooling is designed. But when you’re juggling multiple certifications and various divisions across the globe, that best-case software feels less like a solution and more like a straightjacket. 

You shouldn’t have to overhaul your entire organizational workflow just because a software developer couldn’t build for a business as complex as yours.

At TCT, we’ve seen firsthand how painful and frustrating it can be to manage a complex compliance engagement. We’ve lived it ourselves. We’ve had the frustrating experience of trying to make compliance tools work the way we needed them to, only to cobble together manual workarounds and glitchy add-ons.

Are Rigid Compliance Tools Forcing Your Hand?

The whole purpose of a compliance management system is to make compliance management as simple and efficient as possible — for you! But many compliance tools fail, because they’re too inflexible to adapt to complex compliance engagement.

Using those kinds of inflexible solutions only increases your compliance complexity, because it forces you to create awkward workarounds and to add manual tasks that you otherwise never would have implemented. Your pain goes up, your efficiency tanks, and the value of your compliance solutions comes into question.

Business Impacts of Inflexible Compliance Tools

The business implications of a rigid compliance management system are real. Forcing yourself into a different model of compliance management throws your entire team into unfamiliar territory. Personnel aren’t just learning a new application, they’re learning a whole new process. That throws the door wide open for missed deadlines and unfulfilled compliance management tasks.

As a result, the cost of operations inevitably increases, and your annual certification may be at risk of being denied due to dropped balls. Noncompliance could mean lost customers. 

There’s also the risk of increased turnover. A rigid system is more painful to use, making work more demanding and leading to a lower job satisfaction among your best employees.

TCT Portal Adapts to Your Workflow

We’ve worked with many customers who came to us because they were tired of struggling with other systems that demanded a specific process that simply wasn’t workable in their complex compliance environment.

That’s why we designed TCT Portal specifically to be a high-performance compliance management platform for complex compliance engagements. And because we know what it’s like to try fitting a round peg in a square hole, building a flexible system was at the top of our priority list.

When we first built the platform, we didn’t want to create a compliance tool that would force people to fit their processes to our software. Instead, we purposefully made TCT Portal flexible enough to adapt to your existing workflow. 

Consistently, our customers have expressed great relief and satisfaction because they could finally work the way they wanted to work. Life became less stressful, overtime plummeted, and the complexities of compliance management were dramatically reduced.

With that goal in mind, several capabilities have been built into TCT Portal to make the system flexible to your existing workflow. Here’s just a handful of them.

Streamline Complexity with Mapping

TCT Portal makes it easy to manage multiple compliance standards all in one place, and with one workflow. We use mapping functions to apply common requirements across standards. Duplicate tasks automatically populate in all of the compliance tracks you’re managing.

For example, when you upload your network diagrams in PCI DSS, TCT Portal automatically uploads it to all your other engagements (such as HIPAA and ISO 27001) instantaneously. You don’t have to do a thing.

If you’re working with one or more Assessors, they likely have their own way of doing things, which differs from your organization’s workflow — and from your other Assessors’ systems. Mapping bridges the gap, making it possible to do things your way but deliver what your Assessor wants, how they want it.

Your Assessor may have a prescribed list of items they want to receive from you — and different Assessors have different lists. TCT Portal can take these document request lists and integrate them directly into the Portal. So you can operate the way you want to operate, following your own workflow, and also meet your Assessors’ submission requirements however they define them.

How TCT Portal’s mapping fits within your system:

• Keep your own system: Map evidence once to satisfy multiple requirements across different certifications, without changing your internal naming conventions.
• Bridge the communication gap: Map your system to the specific reporting formats your Assessors demand, automatically.
• Eliminate duplicate effort: Upload a single piece of evidence and map it to every relevant requirement, so you only do the work once, regardless of how many Assessors or standards you have.

TCT Portal frees you to own your own data, house it within your system of record, and make the compliance process easier for yourself (not just for your Assessor).

Manage Scale Seamlessly with Requirement Splitting

If you have multiple locations to collect data from, you’ll need to gather multiple instances of the same type of data. For example, a company with 10 locations needs to have 10 distinct pieces of firewall evidence. It needs 10 separate device inventories, and 10 data logs — and so forth. Each piece of evidence needs to be uniquely distinguished from the others, and associated with the corresponding location.

In most systems, things get messy fast.

TCT Portal has the ability to split specific requirements into sub-requirements that are associated with specific locations. So when each location submits all of its evidence, every file is automatically populated into the sub-requirement that corresponds to that location. You don’t have to devise a clunky workflow or process to accommodate all of your locations. Instead, TCT Portal fits seamlessly into the system you already have — even removing work for you.

Better yet, each of these splits are tracked down to the level of the personnel responsible from each location. It automatically tracks the status of submissions from all of your locations, alleviating the burden of keeping your fingers on the pulse of every required submission. You can instantly tell which locations are taking their responsibilities seriously, and which need to pick up the pace.

Splitting isn’t limited to location. It works across any dimension you like — operating systems, applications, vendors — whatever your needs are for the kinds of complexities you’re dealing with.

Automate Compliance Management with Operational Mode

For almost every compliance standard that exists, there are items that need to be gathered once a year — but there are also items that need to be done daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and semi-annually. It can be tremendously easy to let those tasks slip and to fall behind, which could impact your ability to keep your compliance certification uninterrupted. Especially when you’re only gathering operational evidence once a year.

TCT Portal’s Operational Mode kicks in once you complete your first round of compliance management in the TCT Portal and you’re about to begin your next annual cycle. Operational Mode automatically notifies you as those bite-size periodic requirements come up throughout the year.

Automated reminders are sent to the right people at the right time (personnel start getting reminders two weeks before operational items come due), so tasks are clear and manageable. This helps you to proactively alert team members of their responsibilities, confirm that tasks are getting done (when they should be), and quickly identify any items needing attention to get back on track.

Operational Mode runs completely automatically, alleviating the need for you to create new procedures, policies, or workflows to keep your compliance team on track.

This way, you don’t get to the end of your compliance track and discover during your annual audit that you’re missing an item from Q3. The assurance this provides to you is immeasurable — you can enter the annual assessment with complete confidence every time, knowing you won’t be blindsided by any uncomfortable surprises in front of your Assessor.

Streamline Your Complex Compliance Engagement

Whether you’re going up against a compliance standard or you’re an Assessor, we encourage you to reach out to TCT to talk with us about your compliance complexity. We’ll seek to understand your unique circumstances, then make recommendations for configuring TCT Portal to meet your needs. 

TCT has been making compliance management suck less since 2013, so let our experts put our experience to work for your organization. You’ll streamline your compliance engagements and gain tremendous efficiencies you never imagined would be possible.