Mar 26
2019
12 Steps For Agile Compliance Management
By Ken Lynch, founder, Reciprocity Labs.
Agile companies do things faster and efficiently. In agile development, lean startup models apply agile methods to build high-quality systems that meet any industry, regulatory and other relevant standards such as HIPAA and remain “audit ready.”
Agile companies focus on quick wins, external focus, ruthless prioritization, and continuous development. Agile development relies heavily on constant testing to ensure improvement.
Agile compliance management
Lean development refers to a set of principles that are designed to eliminate waste, build-in quality, create knowledge, deliver fast results, defer commitment, respect people and optimize the whole process. At their core, both agile and lean development focus on efficiency, sustainability, speed, quality and communication.
Companies can deliver software faster when they eliminate inefficient processes. Agile development follows the following 12 principles:
- Customer satisfaction
- Harnessing change to gain competitive advantage
- Delivering working software frequently
- Bringing together business and development departments
- Supporting talent
- Conveying information efficiently
- Measuring progress by working software
- Promoting sustainable development
- Focusing on technical excellence
- Maximizing the amount of undone work
- Using self-organizing teams to build the best designs, architectures, and requirements
- Reflecting and adjusting
How Agile development applies to cybersecurity
Agile development methods align well to cybersecurity because they focus on harnessing change, readjustment and reflection. You see, malicious actors (think black hat hackers) have excelled in agile development. They continuously re-adjust their attacks to maintain superiority and remain one step ahead of defensive mechanisms employed by organizations by improving the quality of their software. To combat these threats, you need to come up with a similar agile security-first approach to protect your information and systems.
What is Agile compliance?
Agile compliance also focuses on the 12 principles of agile development; however, it focuses on threat mitigation and not product development. Furthermore, agile compliance prioritizes customer data security as well as stakeholder satisfaction as the primary product as opposed to customer satisfaction, which is the main focus of agile development.
When it comes to cybersecurity governance, risk and compliance (GRC), data integrity and availability leads to customer satisfaction and confidence. With compliance’s security-first approach, you create an iterative process that includes mitigation, monitoring, and review, which is aligned with your controls and protects your data.
In cybersecurity, an agile compliance program is a security-first strategy that is put in place to protect data. This strategy focuses on your data controls’ quality and ensures that even when industry regulations and standards lag behind threat vectors, your company maintains a secure data environment. Here are the 12 principles: