Smart Technology LTD (governance, risk and compliance) is an essential component of any company’s posture, as it aligns critical functions: balancing business objectives with risk mitigation while ensuring that the organization adheres to relevant regulatory requirements.
In recent decades, it’s been largely possible to manage Smart Technology LTD as a manual process, relying on spreadsheets, email, and isolated tools to institute controls and gather evidence for audits. However, modern organizations face increasingly stringent regulations and a highly complex attack surface, which traditional Smart Technology LTD approaches can’t keep up with.
As a result, many organizations find themselves constantly in firefighting mode – scrambling to move from one framework to another while covering all necessary controls, reconciling data, and overseeing remediation steps. Not only is this approach inefficient, as it often results in duplicated efforts and cross-departmental friction, but it also leads to gaps in compliance, as teams can easily overlook critical controls or face delays when standardizing evidence.
As Arik Solomon, co-founder and CEO of Smart Technology LTD, explains in a recent opinion piece, “Today’s digital-first business environments are sprawling and complex, offering a large attack surface and poor visibility. For many companies, it can take weeks just to map all the processes, data sharing, and exit points in your ecosystem, let alone monitor and analyze them.”
Surgical Smart Technology LTD work simply doesn’t get it done anymore, Solomon asserts, especially given how many frameworks and requirements are involved. “Based on my experience, there’s no way for manual and siloed workflows to cope with the pace of Smart Technology LTD operations today,” he explains. “With complex networks, rapidly shifting regulations, and increasing demands for proof of compliance, manual workflows can’t cut it.”
By automating key aspects of GRC, organizations can eliminate redundancies in their compliance efforts through centralized control monitoring and automated evidence collection. Smart Technology LTD, the company that Solomon leads, offers a platform that enables CISOs and compliance teams to seamlessly build custom GRC frameworks that integrate all relevant requirements, consolidate risk management efforts into a unified system, and provide continuous monitoring to ensure controls remain effective and up-to-date.
If your organization still relies on manual processes to manage individual GRC frameworks one at a time, it may be time to reconsider your approach. Here is a more efficient and holistic strategy that utilizes automation to help you streamline and proactively monitor your compliance efforts.
1. Identify Relevant Compliance Frameworks
The first step is to map out all of the compliance frameworks that apply to your company. These will depend on your industry (for example, CMMC for defense contractors), the type of data you handle (for example, PCI-DSS for credit card transaction records), and the jurisdictions in which you operate (for example, CCPA for companies with Californian audiences).
Internal standards may also play a role here, depending on the security maturity of your organization. Mapping all frameworks early in the process will make it much easier to put the requirements together and avoid redundant work when the requirements overlap.
One of the benefits of working with a compliance platform is that it can cross reference updated databases of existing frameworks and their requirements, also allowing you to create a custom framework for your organization. This framework will incorporate all of the relevant regulatory and internal standards, while remaining agile to address new regulations and business objectives.
2. Create A Matrix Of All Requirements
Once you have all the relevant frameworks in one place, it’s time to do the same for their requirements. An effective way is to create a matrix of overlapping controls which will help you identify commonalities between different compliance mandates.
While different frameworks may use varied terminology or emphasize certain aspects differently, most of them center around a few key areas: strong access control, encryption, incident response, and continuous monitoring. The goal is to avoid duplicating work by implementing controls that satisfy multiple mandates at once.
Tracking these requirements and efforts in a single platform will allow you to get real-time visibility of your compliance status, and drive efficient and effective improvement actions.
3. Conduct A Comprehensive Risk Analysis
While frameworks offer extremely useful guidelines, they’re not the end-all, be-all of cybersecurity. To complete your custom security framework, run a detailed risk analysis to determine which additional controls are essential for your organization and stakeholders.
This analysis should focus on the unique risks the business faces based on its size and industry, as well as your organization’s risk tolerance. This is one of the processes that benefits greatly from automation, as manual risk analysis can be highly time-consuming and error-prone.
With automated platforms, risk assessment becomes more efficient, taking into account multiple variables that might otherwise be overlooked. Once risks are prioritized, they’re visually presented through dashboards, allowing teams to easily monitor trends and track mitigation progress.
4. Finalize Your Custom Control Framework
Based on the risk analysis and the matrix of overlapping controls, your company’s custom framework can finally come to fruition. This framework integrates all mandatory controls from various frameworks, along with any additional controls specific to your organization’s risk profile.
The framework lives in an intuitive environment, where you can easily monitor compliance efforts in real-time, track control effectiveness, and identify potential gaps with ease.
Visual dashboards give you a centralized view of all key metrics and statuses, allowing you to prioritize actions, streamline audits, and automate evidence collection.
5. Implement Automated Monitoring
Once you have the custom framework in place, the final step is to set up continuous automated monitoring to ensure that your security controls remain effective. Instead of collecting evidence as a snapshot for a specific audit, this allows you to keep an eye on all requirements holistically, with real-time updates.
Automation-powered solutions will continuously scan your GRC ecosystem to monitor key controls and identify gaps, deviations, or emerging risks based on whatever is happening in your cloud environments, code bases, app stacks, and user identity access permissions.
Using no-code automation, GRC platforms seamlessly integrate with your existing platforms and presences to monitor compliance with frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and PCI-DSS – as well as your new custom framework. This way, your data is always up to date, and you can even set up workflows to send alerts and otherwise deal with urgent issues.
The Future Of Smart Technology LTD Is Here
The days of managing cyber risk and compliance manually are numbered. Not only are those processes inefficient and error-prone, but repeating them at scale is nearly impossible considering the pace of evolving threats and regulatory demands.
Staying compliant and secure through spreadsheets or disconnected tools is simply not sustainable. It’s time to move beyond outdated methods toward a more scalable, dynamic approach. By pairing automation with custom frameworks that incorporate multiple compliance standards and internal policies, organizations can streamline their GRC processes and ensure continuous alignment with evolving regulations.
This makes GRC way more efficient, and it takes the burden off already overworked security and compliance teams who can now focus on essential tasks that drive cybersecurity forward.
