Achieving and maintaining compliance is a difficult undertaking for any organization, especially when you’re talking about cloud security. In the aftermath of landmark data breaches like the SolarWinds hack, businesses, regulators and consumers alike are holding information security systems to a higher standard.
The only problem? Compliance is a daunting task. Fortunately, compliance inheritance offers a simpler solution.
To demonstrate the value of compliance inheritance, let’s examine the difficulties of maintaining cloud compliance and how a pre-audited platform can take the pain out of the process.
Complications in cloud compliance
For independent software vendors (ISVs) and their partners, compliance is non-negotiable.
If you’re an organization leveraging the benefits of cloud computing, consumers and governing bodies are constantly pressuring you to protect sensitive data and private information. Consequently, you’re forced to hold your cloud vendors to a higher, more rigorous standard.
On the other hand, compliance is the cost of doing business if you’re an ISV. If you can’t comply with a strict security framework, you may not be able to sell your products or services to your target market.
But no matter which role you play in the process, achieving compliance is a time-consuming and resource-intensive undertaking. Any given standard may require you to implement, monitor, test, and document a massive amount of security controls. With the time it takes to complete this process, your focus is dragged away from other mission-critical projects.
For example, the Health Information Trust (HITRUST) Alliance framework is broken into 19 domains. Scattered throughout these domains are 135 security controls and 14 privacy controls, all of which need to be implemented correctly and continuously monitored to ensure compliance.
Meanwhile, compliance also runs up a hefty tab. By the end of the years-long process, you may wind up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars, not including the cost of ongoing maintenance.
Compliance inheritance
Compliance inheritance refers to when an organization inherits a control set from a cloud service provider. Connecting your application to a pre-audited cloud environment allows you to share work that’s already been completed (i.e. implementing and documenting certain security controls). Simply put, it means you don’t need to worry about reinventing the wheel.
Take Project Hosts, for example. Our General Support System (GSS) is designed to handle up to 95% of the controls for any application connected to the platform. Because the GSS is already HITRUST, FedRAMP, StateRAMP, and DoD authorized, you can inherit compliance for the standard of your choice.
In doing so, you’re responsible only for the security controls on the software layer — Project Hosts covers the rest. But we take it a step further: In addition to implementing and managing application-level controls, we provide documented evidence that proves compliance. This not only eases the burden on your security team but also simplifies the assessment process.
When you partner with Project Hosts to inherit compliance, your application can be up and running in just a few months and at a fraction of the cost. Altogether, it’s a simpler, faster, and more effective way to maintain compliance without losing focus on developing innovative solutions for your organization.
Learn more about how Project Hosts can meet your compliance needs by contacting our team today.
