Making the Right Choice for Your Business
While starting and scaling your business requires maintaining a number of compliance requirements, it can be daunting to know when and where to turn for assistance. The number of consultants, GRC (governance, risk and compliance) companies, task management software solutions and checklist organizations is growing all the time. Whether you’re working towards meeting HIPAA, SOC 2, or ISO 27001 requirements, it can be difficult to discern the difference between all of the services available. MedStack is committed to helping our customers better understand the landscape, and through this page, we aim to help you decide whether you need a checklist company or MedStack.Don’t Be Mislead by Marketing Tactics
If you’ve been searching for assistance with meeting various security and privacy compliance requirements, it’s likely you’ve come across consulting or checklist companies that make claims such as “Be SOC 2 audit ready in 1 month”. While this is a true statement, the process of an audit takes significant time, effort and expertise, and you may not pass the audit quickly or easily. When companies say compliance is easy, they’re telling the truth – it can be. But it’s only easy if you’ve got the resources, expertise, time, and budget to manage multiple security requirements yourself. For many businesses, this becomes an expensive trap to fall into.Understanding and Maintaining Compliance
Data privacy and security compliance is designed to help your business manage safety risks relating to protected health information, and to keep those risks within an acceptable level. Part of maintaining compliance involves performing a number of internal audits, so that you can claim a certain level of compliance relative to the standards of the regions your app runs in. These internal audits can take substantial amounts of time and energy to do manually. They can often require specialized information and expertise, which your internal team may or may not be able to readily access on your own. After this point, external audits need to be carried out by a registered third-party certification body, so that your compliance claims can be verified.Costing
This is where other companies can get customers in the door with promises of low-cost compliance solutions. Unfortunately, many clients find that once they’ve signed up for this ‘low-cost’ service, they’re required to upgrade to a more expensive service or consulting engagement. This is because there are additional efforts required to meet healthcare laws, SOC 2, or ISO 27001 audits beyond simply being ready to start the audits themselves. In some cases, this results in companies being forced to look elsewhere for assistance. We often speak with companies who come to us with “sticker shock”, after their internal teams discover that they don’t have the time, knowledge and expertise to carry out the checklist items provided.Meeting Compliance Standards
Checklist models only function on the assumption that you have a large team at your disposal, from which you can access the expertise necessary to take action and accomplish the work required. This could involve a number of different factors including, but not limited to:- Designing security measures
- Implementing security measures
- Putting safeguards in place to prevent data leaks
- Testing to ensure the effectiveness of new safeguards
- Creating new policies and procedures
- Implementing and tracking new policies and procedures
- Defending new policies and procedures from scrutiny