High-profile cyberthreats continue to dominate headlines, but the challenges around regulatory compliance can sometimes get overlooked as enterprises shift business-critical applications and workloads to the cloud.
Without visibility across the digital estate, organizations may struggle to adapt and comply with fast-changing regulatory requirements, potentially exposing the business to unnecessary risk.
A framework for continuous monitoring and remediation is required. This enables security teams to rapidly identify threats and create actionable insights for a real-time view of security and compliance status.
Assessing potential impact
Risks of noncompliance vary depending on regulation, industry, and location, but the consequences can be steep, ranging from reputational damage and loss of customer trust to security breaches and regulatory fines.
In early 2024, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) targeted 16 firms to pay more than $81 million[i] combined to settle charges for widespread recordkeeping failures, including an inability to maintain and preserve electronic communications. With this latest action, the total fines[ii] levied by the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) for off-channel and recordkeeping incidents amount to $2.6 billion. A report[iii] from Fenergo found the total value of penalties issued by US regulators increased by 151% between 2021 and 2022.
In 2023, a prominent social media company was hit with a groundbreaking General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) fine surpassing 1.2 billion euros. Collectively, GDPR fines have now reached over 4 billion euros, highlighting the significant consequences of noncompliance.
Compliance requirements for the GDPR and other state and country-specific data protection and privacy laws are constantly changing. This makes it difficult for companies to keep up, especially as they migrate data, applications, and workloads to the cloud.
According to the ISC2 2023 Cloud Security Report,[iv] top inhibitors to faster cloud adoption include:
- 38% – Data privacy
- 30% – Legal and regulatory compliance
- 29% – Data security and leakage risks
More than half of respondents (52%) said ensuring data protection and privacy for each environment was a major inhibitor to implementing multicloud environments.
Meanwhile, meeting governance and compliance regulations is a major challenge for 26% of those responding to the Foundry Security Priorities Study 2023.[v]
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) now has global governance regulations. The US and the EU have introduced GenAI-related guidelines and regulations, including the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. Noncompliance with these emerging laws can result in penalties.
Complexities in meeting compliance mandates
Companies face several common challenges in meeting and maintaining compliance mandates. They include:
Limited skilled resources: Finding the right talent with skills that span cloud deployment, cloud-native security controls, and industry-specific compliance regulations and practices can be difficult, especially as technology continues to evolve. Many of these skills are new and highly specialized. They are also highly coveted, which means IT organizations struggle to source staff from a limited pool of candidates.
Compliance priorities: Many organizations fail to focus on compliance initiatives until there’s a pressing need, whether they come under a regulator’s radar or face an audit. Without careful planning and the right solutions in place, businesses leave themselves vulnerable to risk.
Lack of technical visibility. Many organizations have limited visibility into what is actually running in their cloud environments, which hinders an accurate inventory of assets. They may also lack visibility into security and compliance status, which limits how they identify risks and gaps, making it difficult to update key stakeholders.
Over-reliance on manual processes. The particulars around compliance practices—including maintaining security policies and auditing controls—are often comprised of resource-intensive, manual processes. This can lead to errors and slow processing times, negatively impacting value-added work.
Wipro Cloud Compliance Shield
The Wipro Cloud Compliance Shield solution leverages the scalability and security of AWS with Wipro’s deep expertise in cloud security and risk and compliance. Amazon Security Lake centralizes data across the digital estate, enabling customers to maximize the value of data in pursuit of continuous compliance.
Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker machine learning (ML) capabilities combine security data, threat intelligence, and GenAI capabilities to deliver insights that support continuous compliance and remediation, including automatically managing industry- and geographic-specific requirements.
Backed by Wipro’s worldwide network of more than 9,000 cybersecurity specialists, customers have ready access to experts to help solve the most complex security and compliance challenges.
Together, Wipro and AWS deliver the Wipro Cloud Compliance Shield solution to automate compliance and reduce risk in several key ways:
- Continuous compliance through ingestion of regulatory obligations on a real-time basis so requirements are met around the clock;
- Real-time and unified updates of the security and compliance posture of cloud environments at any time;
- Reduced time for assessing and mitigating compliance gaps for both technical and nontechnical regulatory standards control requirements;
- Automated processing of governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) data with detailed remediation recommendations;
- Contextualized stakeholder reporting and role-based access controls for different personas to provide executive and regulatory agency reviews;
- Auto-remediation of security issues in cloud environments;
- Utilization of existing investments and third-party integrations for proactive risk mitigation without unnecessary costs.
The Wipro Common Cloud Controls Framework (C3F) serves as a backbone to the Wipro Cloud Compliance Shield. It provides comprehensive risk profiling, thorough control gap assessments, and strategic insights to maintain continuous compliance in a cloud environment. Wipro C3F currently covers 27+ regulatory standards and associated control requirements—including both technical and nontechnical controls—and is continuously evolving to support other standards based on industry need.
“GenAI is used to reduce the human-intensive and laborious process of identifying updates and making changes to newer version of various regulations, compliance, and standards,” says Bhaveshkumar Bhatt, senior partner and general manager for Cloud Security at Wipro.
The GenAI capability connects with authoritative sources for regulations and compliance standards to study and understand controls and associated requirements. It also performs the appropriate mapping to contribute to the intelligence of the C3F.
The Wipro Cloud Compliance Shield solution, powered by AWS, has more than 1,200 cloud security control checks and best practices embedded. The result is greater efficiency and faster remediation, including up to 75% time savings in identifying relevant regulatory controls.
The bottom line
Maintaining compliance in a cloud environment is complex and arduous. Armed with the right partners and GenAI solutions, enterprises can better mitigate risk, maintain customer trust, and automate compliance regulations. To learn more about the Wipro Cloud Compliance Shield, view customer success stories and/or request a meeting, visit Wipro Cloud Compliance Shield.
[i] https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2024-18
[ii] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/secs-recordkeeping-fines-offer-lessons-to-compliance-officers
[iii] https://www.tradersmagazine.com/xtra/financial-institution-penalties-issued-by-us-regulators-reach-3-billion-finds-report/
[iv]https://www.isc2.org/-/media/Project/ISC2/Main/Media/Marketing-Assets/CCSP/2023-Cloud-Security-Report-ISC2_final.pdf
[v] https://foundryco.com/tools-for-marketers/research-security-priorities/