Security and compliance: from challenge to opportunity

Security and compliance are two of the biggest issues facing organisations in the modern world of work. Data from KPMG shows that dealing with evolving regulatory processes, including reporting changes and impacts, is an issue for 35% of Australian business leaders, making it one of the top five business challenges in 2023. KPMG reports that this will continue to be a key challenge for organisations in the next three to five years.

Businesses must take the time to invest in solutions, best practices, and processes that ensure they keep up with changing legislation and regulatory requirements. Failure to do so means potentially falling behind competitors and facing significant risks, including financial and reputational losses. However, as organisations learn to navigate the challenges associated with governance, risk and compliance (GRC), business leaders also have the chance to turn challenges into opportunities.

Inefficiency an issue

Compliance is a key challenge for today’s organisations, and transforming a business’s entire operations to ensure it remains compliant with regulations and legislations that can rapidly change can be complex. When it filters down to daily operations, even small changes can help to create more compliant organisations.

Some of the biggest challenges businesses face when it comes to compliance are having inefficient compliance tools in place as well as poor document control, which is often overlooked. As such, one of the easiest first steps an organisation can take towards compliance is to ensure that its fundamental technologies have compliance built into their core.

Document management fundamentals

Improving the management of the fundamentals, such as document control, is the key towards creating a more compliant workplace from the bottom up. Inefficient document management opens businesses up to compliance risks, as well as security vulnerabilities, which can lead to bigger business challenges.

However, modern document management solutions have built-in capabilities, such as permissions management, to help organisations enforce more robust security and compliance. They also leverage automation capabilities to support streamlined governance and policy management as well as automated data retention. This is critical to supporting improved audit processes.

Document management solutions can also help businesses reduce the potential for data leakage by leveraging role-based permissions to restrict access only to authorised personnel.

One of the biggest benefits of modern document management solutions is the improved capacity to demonstrate compliance to auditors and regulators as well as partners and customers. Digital document management solutions have tracking built-in to create digital paper trails of every document version. This lets business leaders rapidly audit document histories against policies and regulations to ensure compliance.

Implementing more compliant technology solutions to better manage daily operations, such as improved document management and control, can help business leaders to build a strong culture of compliance across their operations. Additionally, making changes to implement more compliant technology solutions also provides business leaders with opportunities to revise existing processes and procedures around their operations and replace them with more compliant solutions.

Technology changes can be daunting. However, the latest solutions deliver a greater level of security and compliance that can help business leaders achieve the peace of mind they need to know their document management is as protected as possible. Additionally, technology-driven changes also demand the rest of the organisation falls in line to ensure that not only is the technology compliant, but the way in which it is managed also meets compliance requirements.

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