Risk and Compliance: Do you have control over Critical documents?

Assuming you work for a large organization, or even a moderately sized one, critical documents can make or break your entire operations. 

This is especially true in a day and age of increased regulations, oversight, liability, prosecution, and insurance costs. 

So how do you avoid these serious pitfalls that can hurt, and even destroy your organization? 

This is where risk and compliance comes into play. 

Having control over these critical documents will provide enough ample evidence to regulators that your company, organization, or government has been following the law and is fully compliant. 

But what are the first steps to take to ensure control over this process? 

Let’s dive into this topic a bit further…

Regulatory enforcement

As previously mentioned, a key factor of regulatory compliance and risk comes down to the ability of your organization to provide evidence to regulators that you have been following the law. 

This can be provided through physical documents, audit results and digital versions of these. 

If you can’t prove to government officials and regulators that you’re following the law, you may see yourself facing a large fine. 

One example is from the US, where Capital One was fined $80 million dollars by the US Office of the Comptroller of the currency. This should further motivation to follow the rules…

Like what you’re reading? Contact me now to discuss your project!

What to consider with Risk and Compliance documents

So what are some key things that you need to consider with your risk and compliance documents? 

It really boils down to your documents being easily retrievable, organized, updated and written in the way they are required to be according to local regulations. 

Make sure to consider if your documents are…

• Secure.
• Identifiable by the correct people.
• Consistent across your organization.
• Tracked to see who saw them.
• Easily maineted.
• Not easily deleted, moved or copied.
• Updated.

Document control when it comes to Risk and Compliance 

Considering the factors previously mentioned, make sure these apply to your documents consistently within your network folders. 

Another best practice is to make sure that you have a summary layer. 

This is a simple way to track which risk and compliance documents are present, and whether they are all up to date. This can usually come in the form of spreadsheets either physically or digitally. 

However, there can be some issues with physical documentation…

You made it this far, so you must like my writing! Let’s get in touch…

Why cloud technology is critical

Bottom line, cloud technology and the internet are here to stay, and this massive and continuous shift has touched every industry, especially governance, regulation and compliance. 

Digitizing documents is more common than ever, and this isn’t just a passing trend.

Physical documentation can be prone to errors, and can be time and money intensive, especially when it comes to paper cost and the labour to organize it. 

So why waste the money? 

GRC softwares can close the gap of inefficiencies with the old way, and bring a newer more effective way to ensure compliance and reduce risk.

The more you can prove you are following the law, the more you can rest easy that your organization or enterprise is within your regulators demands! 

Ready to get more subscriptions and sales for your SaaS? Contact me now to discuss your project.

Advertisement