Make Sure Your Ducks are in a Row
KirkpatrickPrice
Your trusted audit partner for assuring your clients that their sensitive data is protected.
We are happy to help you ring in 2024!?Our new year’s resolution is to continue providing you with audit readiness tips that will help your next audit feel a little less intimidating. And we think we are off to a great start with this issue of The Readiness Report.
In this month’s issue you’ll learn:
P.S. If you know someone who could benefit from audit readiness tips, send them this link so they can start the year off right by subscribing to The Readiness Report.
For many of us, the new year marks the end of the holiday season. However, others are still in the midst of an exciting time of year. For those of you who hunt, we’re sure you spend your weeks thinking about the next time you’ll be out in the woods or in your blind. We know how important it is to make sure all of your gear is ready to go at the start of every hunting season. You wouldn’t want to drive out to your favorite spot and set up just to realize you were missing something or an important piece of your gear wasn’t working, would you? Of course not! The same goes for the security and compliance of your organization.
When a security event happens, you don’t want to be scrambling, not knowing what to do or how to recover. This is where policies and procedures come in. Making sure you have these documents up to date and tailored to your organization’s needs is an essential part of your organization’s wellbeing.
Audit Readiness: The Importance of Policies and Procedures
Recently, we attended a conference where we met an executive of an organization that was preparing for their SOC 2 audit. To get ready, they were running their policies and procedures through Chat GPT to fill in any gaps that might exist. While AI tools can be helpful for small tasks and brainstorming, something as important as your policies and procedures shouldn't be left to a tool that doesn’t understand the intricacies of your organization.
We understand how intimidating policies and procedures can be, and it’s not uncommon for organizations to want to avoid creating them. But, when a security event like a data breach occurs, the organizations that don’t have proper documentation in place are the ones that suffer the most.
Below are three of the main reasons organizations avoid policies and procedures:
1.???? It’s hard to write policies and procedures.
We understand how overwhelming starting from scratch can feel, but when it comes to policies and procedures, having something is better than nothing. That’s what an audit is for, after all. Even if your processes aren’t perfectly documented, your auditor will have something to look at and be able to recommend improvements to help keep your organization secure and compliant.
2.??? Policies and procedures will change my company.
While documenting your organization’s processes may compromise some flexibility and expose some unexpected gaps, they will allow your company to protect itself against any vulnerabilities and continue to function if an essential employee were to leave. Additionally, these documents should reflect your company’s actual processes. As long as your processes are up-to-code with the regulations affecting your org, your company shouldn’t experience change from documentation, only assurance that it’s ready to face today’s threats confidently. ?
Implementing proper policies and procedures may feel like a big change at first, but they will greatly pay off in the long run.
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3.??? There’s no time to write policies and procedures.
We get it, you’re busy with your other organizational tasks and responsibilities, and it can feel like a waste of valuable time to sit down and create your policies and procedures. However, by taking time to write these documents now, you’re reducing stress on your operations team and giving your employees confidence because they know what’s expected of them. Writing your policies and procedures is a daunting task to be sure, but we promise you’ll be thankful for the time spent in the end.
Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by going into the new year unprepared. Make sure you get all of your organization's ducks in a row by understanding the importance of policies and procedures. For more information on this topic, check out the full blog here. If you need help writing your policies and procedures or you’d like an expert to review them, connect with one of our experts today!
Tip from an Expert
This month, our founder and president, Joseph Kirkpatrick, provided a quick tip on why it’s so important to keep your policies and procedures up to date.
“Creating, implementing, and maintaining effective policies and procedures is paramount to ensuring an organization’s longevity. While updating policies and procedures on a regular basis may seem like a tedious task, it’s a necessary one. To ensure compliance, establishing processes to ensure that the expectations of policies and procedures are met needs to be a top priority. Committing to the process of maintaining effective policies and procedures will only have benefits in the long run and will allow organizations to meet the expectations of policies and procedures during their audit journey.”
The More You Know
It can be difficult to write your policies and procedures when you don’t know where to start. In this video clip, one of our compliance experts discusses six things to include when writing your information security policies. We know that getting your documents in order for your next audit can feel overwhelming, but by writing them one step at a time, you’ll have policies and procedures that you can be proud of.
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Prepare to face today's threats confidently with The Readiness Report.
KirkpatrickPrice is the leader in cyber security and compliance audit reports. Our experienced auditors know audits are hard, so they take complicated audits such as SOC 1, SOC 2, PCI DSS, HIPAA, HITRUST, GDPR, and ISO 27001 and make them worth it. The firm has issued over 10,000 reports to over 1,200 clients worldwide, giving its clients trusted results and the assurance they deserve. Using its Online Audit Manager, the world’s first compliance platform, KirkpatrickPrice partners its clients with an expert to guide them through the entire audit process, from audit readiness to final report.