Regulatory compliance

In general, compliance means conforming to a rule, such as a specification, policy, standard or law. Regulatory compliance describes the goal that organisations aspire to achieve in their efforts to ensure that they are aware of and take steps to comply with relevant laws, polices, and regulations. Due to the increasing number of regulations and need for operational transparency, organizations are increasingly adopting the use of consolidated and harmonized sets of compliance controls. This approach is used to ensure that all necessary governance requirements can be met without the unnecessary duplication of effort and activity from resources.

The International Organization for Standardisation (ISO) produces international standards such as ISO/IEC 27002. The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) produces international standards in the electrotechnology area. The ISO 19600:2014 standard provides a reminder of how compliance and risk should operate together, as “colleagues” sharing a common framework with some nuances to account for their differences.

Some local or international specialized organizations such as the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) also develop standards and regulation codes. They thereby provide a wide range of rules and directives to ensure compliance of the products to safety, security or design standards.

There are a number of other regulations which apply in different fields, such as PCI-DSS, GLBA, FISMA, Joint Commission and HIPAA. In some cases other compliance frameworks (such as COBIT) or standards (NIST) inform on how to comply with the regulations.

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