Your guide to Cybersecurity Regulatory Compliance

The number and severity of cyber-attacks are increasing with time. International industry standards and government authorities aim to regulate cybersecurity by enforcing stricter cybersecurity compliance criteria.

To stay ahead of the expanding regulatory requirements, organisations must adopt a security-first approach to cybersecurity to prepare for shifting cybersecurity compliance requirements.

As a data security professional, you may be responsible for obtaining SOC2 compliance for your company, implementing a NIST framework, or complying with the new ever-evolving privacy regulations. These are only a few examples, as you might likely face multiple cyber security standards to follow.

However, it isn’t easy to understand what cyber security framework is appropriate for your organisation. Also, for regulatory compliance, selecting the proper security standard that matches your organisational goals and is cost-effective is essential.

Also, even if you have a small business that does not come in the scope of state regulations, you may need to adopt a cyber security standard to assure your customers that their data is safe.

Nowadays, organisations and individuals are more concerned about data protection and cyber security due to the headlines we see, which are often filled with data breaches. It’s usually the reasoning behind the shift in tick-in-the-box security towards proactive measures such as intelligence-led penetration testing and cyber security assessments. 

What are the risks posed by data security breaches?

Key findings of the IBM data breach report:

AI is reshaping cybethreats, identity and cloud security. 

1. Global Average Cost is $4.99 million per breach (up 12% year-over-year).

2. One in four malicious breaches involved artificial intelligence, jumping 56% compared to the prior year.

3. AI-driven breaches cost an average of $6.04 million, roughly $1 million higher than non-AI-related incidents.

4. Incidents involving unapproved or untracked employee AI tools (Shadow AI) nearly doubled, affecting 43% of breached organisations.

5. 39% of organisations experienced a ransomware attack, marking the fourth consecutive annual increase.

6. Companies that extensively used security AI and automation cut their total breach costs by an average of nearly $2 million.

The above findings are from IBM and tech-insider. As a result of adoption of AI, threat actors increase in tactics and exploit development is making organisations vulnerable to these data breaches. Cybercriminals target small businesses to get illegal access to data they may sell on the dark web. To obtain access, hackers and social engineers exploit flaws in systems, networks, software, and people.

Whether PII compromises or employs weak network connections for transactions, small and medium-sized businesses are too vulnerable to these data breaches, resulting in loss and sales revenue.

Following the discovery of a data breach, organisations subject to industry or regional cybersecurity regulations are compelled by law to comply and perform the authorised actions. If a company is discovered non-compliant, it may face severe fines and penalties.

Strict adherence to cybersecurity compliance rules lowers the likelihood of a data breach and the less-quantifiable consequences, such as violation of missing data breach reporting, reputation harm, business interruption, and loss of business.

What is cybersecurity compliance?

In general, compliance is described as adhering to rules and achieving benchmarks. Compliance in cybersecurity refers to developing a cybersecurity program that sets risk-based controls to safeguard the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of stored, processed, or transferred information.

Cybersecurity compliance is not dependent on a single standard or law. Depending on the industry, several standards may overlap, causing confusion and additional work for businesses that use a checklist-based approach.

Meeting regulatory compliance standards and criteria has benefits for organisations. Implementing appropriate safeguards and security measures to protect sensitive customer and employee information strengthens the company’s security posture, which also aids in protecting intellectual property such as trade secrets, software code, product specifications, and other information that gives your company a competitive advantage. These safeguards are only possible when there is a senior management buy in with a carefully crafted information governance, risk and compliance plan.  Get in touch to discuss more and how Cyphere’s Governance, risk and compliance services can benefit your organisation. 

Security and compliance are not the same thing

Security: Cyber security is an ongoing practice of executing technical tools, processes, and controls to protect sensitive data and critical assets of information systems to guard against risks and attacks. Security’s primary goal is to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the system and assets. It can be achieved through physical and technical controls.

Furthermore, where the compliances accommodate meeting legal, and financial risks, cyber security facilitates protecting people, devices, and networks to assure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of assets.

Compliance: Compliance means rule adherence to third-party regulatory requirements, frameworks, and policies enacted by industry groups and authorities to align the business’s operations with law. Security compliance testing services example would include PCI DSS and segmentation tests, ISO 27001 based vulnerability scanning, gambling commission yearly audit or other compliance requirements. 

The primary goal of compliance in security is to ensure that the company’s data is processed and collected by meeting the pre-defined standards or framework with minimum security-related conditions. Unlike security, compliance is a critical element and necessary for a business to operate. It can be multifaceted. However, it covers legal, financial, and other types of risk based on company data types and processes.

What is security compliance management?

Security compliance management is a minimum requirement to maintain data security across the organisation’s processes. It is an ongoing exercise and foundation to ensure that organisations have all defined components to practice information security and legal demands in the operational business environment.

In essence, this process is all about planning, organising, controlling, maintaining, and accessing activities and assets to make businesses obey industry standards, policies, and regulatory demands.

The organisation must have a compliance management program to understand how the business should perform its day-to-day operations. It helps streamline the business flow concerning the regulatory standards effectively and continuously monitor the documented and implemented security measures adequacy and status.

The compliance aligned the organisation’s business and security goals by assessing the assets to identify elements not operating according to documented policies and processes that do not comply with the framework due to misconfiguration, missing security measures, or other resources.

With appropriate security and compliance management program, an organisation can specify and determine the risk and threats they face according to their business models, technologies, processes, and people.

Security compliance management impacts multiple areas of the business environment; some of them are

• Required security controls and their selection
• Technological complexity
• Organisational complexity
• Scope of compliance requirements
• Security assessment time frame
• Legal and regulatory obligation
• Reporting

What data is in scope?

Cybersecurity and data protection regulations are primarily concerned with the safeguarding of personal information related to natural persons, such as personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), and payment card information (PCI).

PII (Personally Identifiable Information)

PII includes any information that may be used to identify a person, such as: uniquely

1. Names
2. Social security number (SSN) or driver’s license number
3. Address information
4. Biometric data.
5. Date of birth
6. Employment information
7. Student educational records

Protected Health Information (PHI)

Protected health information comprises details about an individual’s health history or treatments that are more sensitive and could be used to identify a person, such as:

1. Previous medical history
2. Admissions records
3. Medical record number
4. Records of prescriptions
5. Medical appointment information
6. Records of insurance

Payment Card Information 

Merchants, vendors and service providers handle the payment card information to process credit/debit card payment transactions, such as taking or processing payments made on printed vouchers, over the phone, in person, or online. This data set includes financial information including:

1. The cardholder’s name,
2. Primary account number,
3. Expiration date and
4. Security code.

PCI also includes sensitive data, such as:

1. Magnetic-stripe data,
2. Data stored on a chip and
3. PINs.

We have covered sensitive data and examples to make it an easy-to-understand concept about data protection and privacy regulations. 

Suggested Read: PCI Compliance

How do cybersecurity regulations apply to different types of data?

Achieving cybersecurity compliance is not dependent on a single standard or regulation. Based on the data a company processes, there may be numerous applicable standards and regulations. It is also possible that a company must comply with multiple laws simultaneously, depending on the nature of the data they collect.

Since each information security standard and privacy regulation safeguards a specific group of personal information, to understand how to accomplish cyber security compliance, you must first determine all of the personal information identifiers that your company processes and then identify all of the applicable laws and standards that are required to protect it. This will ensure direct input towards a security plan for your organisation. 

Examples of cybersecurity regulatory compliance 

PCI DSS

Providers who accept payments through point-of-service (POS) devices such as credit card readers must employ PCI DSS-compliant hardware and software to comply with PCI DSS regulations (PCI DSS). PCI DSS standard provides a framework for financial institutions to thoroughly audit their IT security posture. This international standard also ensures that cardholder data is protected from loss and misuse as it is collected, maintained, handled, and transmitted.

GDPR

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applies to organisations that serve European and UK data subjects. It protects all those personal data identifiers that could be used to identify an individual. Apart from individuals, operational resilience for regulated or economically critical sectors is the top priority of nation-states; one example is The European Commission’s introduction of the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA).  

SOC 2 (System and Organisation Controls 2)

SOC2 applies to any technical service provider or SaaS provider that handles or maintains customer data. That implies it applies to almost any SaaS company and any company that stores user data on the cloud. Third parties or support organisations with whom such enterprises collaborate should likewise be SOC 2 compliant to protect the integrity of customer data. 

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

The GDPR is a data protection and privacy law enacted by the European Union on May 25, 2018, to mandate businesses operating in the EU region or dealing with EU customers to conform to the GDPR principles and provide citizens broader control over their personal data collection and processing.

In addition, the law provides guidelines and covers all aspects of data protection technical controls that help reduce the risk, attack surface, and likelihood of cyber attack.

The GDPR helps businesses embrace a secure workflow and penalises organisations and businesses that fail to adopt legislation or expose EU citizen personal information and sensitive data in data breaches and privacy outbreaks.

PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards)

PCI DSS is a security standard launched on September 7, 2006, by PCI SSC, an independent regulatory body formed by major credit card companies- Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and JCB to manage and maintain the payment card industry with a unified set of standard with an aim to improve the payment account security throughout the transaction processes.

It is designed and mandatory for all organisations that accept, process, handle, store credit card information despite the size and number of transactions. It includes fintech, banking sectors, businesses accepting card payments, and storing sensitive information such as name, credit card number, etc.

PCI DSS compliance defined 12 requirements under six focused principles with actionable steps that businesses must implement to comply with the PCI controls. PCI does not impose penalties; instead, it charges $5000 to $100,000 per month until the merchant and businesses achieve PCI compliance.

ISO 27001

ISO 27001 is an international standard published by the International Standard Organisation to facilitate industries and organisations of all sizes to protect their information system with a combination of policies and processes most systematically and cost-effectively.

It defines rules and requirements through the adaptation of ISMS (Information Security Management System) and enables organisations to handle the security of assets such as PII, financial information, and intellectual property.

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

NIST framework is designed voluntary for businesses and organisations to access, control and mitigate cyber security risk. It provides supervision to reduce the internal and external attack surface with specific sets of instruction and customisable activities based on standards, best practices, and guidelines. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) provides a flexible, risk-based approach for managing security threats—and it is widely adopted by both government bodies and private enterprises. The model organises cybersecurity activities across core pillars to help organisations assess risks, strengthen defences, and recover swiftly from incidents:

1. Govern: Establish and monitor the organisation’s cybersecurity strategy and policies.

2. Identify: Pinpoint critical assets, systems, data, and enterprise risks.

3. Protect: Safeguard services through safeguards and access controls.

4. Detect: Spot potential cybersecurity events and breaches promptly.

5. Respond: Execute actions to contain the impact of an incident.

6. Recover: Restore capabilities and assets affected by security threats.

HealthCare Cyber Security Compliance

The Digital Technology Assessment Criteria (DTAC)

The DTAC sets the baseline entry standard for digital health technologies used within the NHS and social care. It evaluates products across clinical safety, data protection, technical security, interoperability, and usability. Meeting these criteria assures buyers that health apps and software handle patient data securely and meet strict UK regulatory expectations.

Data Security and Protection Toolkit (DSPT)

The DSPT is an online self-assessment tool required for any organisation handling NHS patient data or systems. It measures compliance against the National Data Guardian’s ten data security standards to ensure personal information remains protected. Completing this annual assessment is mandatory to prove operational resilience and maintain access to critical health networks.

Medical Device Cyber Security

Connected medical devices – from pacemakers to hospital imaging systems – face unique risks from malware and unauthorised access. Regulations mandate secure hardware design, encrypted data transmission, and regular security patching throughout the product lifecycle. Ensuring robust device security protects clinical functionality and prevents cyber threats from compromising patient safety.

ISO 14971:2019 – Medical Devices

ISO 14971:2019 defines the international standard for applying risk management to medical devices. It requires manufacturers to identify hazards—including software vulnerabilities and cyber threats—and systematically estimate, evaluate, and control those risks. Adherence ensures device safety from design to decommissioning while aligning cybersecurity protocols with overall patient care standards.

Cyber Essentials Scheme 

The UK public sector has made Cyber Essentials Certification a mandatory requirement to be eligible for government contracts and work through its G-Cloud marketplace framework. Cyber Essentials is a government scheme providing guidance to guard against cyber-attacks across five critical technical controls:

1. Boundary firewalls and internet gateways: Controlling traffic between devices and external networks.

2. Secure configuration: Disabling unnecessary services, default credentials, and insecure settings.

3. User access control: Limiting user accounts and privileges according to role requirements.

4. Malware protection: Deploying anti-malware and app restrictions to block malicious code.

5. Patch management: Keeping operating systems and software updated with security fixes.

Minimum Cyber Security Standard

Developed by the Cabinet Office and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the Minimum Cyber Security Standard (MCSS) sets out mandatory cyber hygiene requirements for UK government departments and agencies. Based closely on the NIST framework structure—Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover – it forces public sector bodies to catalogue sensitive data, secure high-privilege accounts, and implement active threat detection. Mandatory adoption ensures government entities build operational resilience against widespread cyber threats while extending security expectations to their digital supply chains.  

Advantages of cybersecurity compliance

Maintaining the security and privacy of customers is a significant concern for organisations and their IT departments that support them as data breaches become more common and hazardous, even among small and medium businesses. 

Compliance in the context of information security ensures that the organisation’s security and user’s data privacy are managed and maintained for all business processes.

Aside from maintaining industry-specific compliance to avoid costly data breaches, here are six advantages of cyber security compliance for every organisation:

1. Cybersecurity compliance aids in the avoidance of hefty fines and penalties.
2. Cybersecurity compliance safeguards the company’s reputation by avoiding non-compliant data processing activities that could risk its information assets.
3. Cybersecurity compliance strengthens business functions in data protection by supporting customers’ privacy rights to access, delete, or modify their data.
4. Cybersecurity compliance builds trust among business partners by demonstrating that the company has done its due diligence to secure the data it collects.
5. Cybersecurity compliance enhances business culture by implementing security controls and data processing good practices that meet or exceed applicable laws or regulations while also displaying industry leadership in information security.
6. Cybersecurity compliance promotes transparency and accountability by mandating organisations to deploy appropriate technical and organisational controls and prove their effectiveness when requested by individuals and authorities.

How to implement a cybersecurity compliance program?

Implementing a security program throughout the organisation will help you achieve cybersecurity compliance. It is critical to identify compliance obligations and map out step-by-step procedures to accomplish an adequate state of compliance. The following activities should be prioritised for implementing the cybersecurity compliance program:

1. Dedicate a resource for compliance activities

Whether your organisation is small or medium-sized, you should consider forming a compliance team to achieve cyber resilience. It is not necessary to have an entire department dedicated to compliance activities. All you need to do is:

1. Hire an information security analyst responsible for monitoring compliance requirements,
2. Consume your IT department’s existing resources to identify and minimise cyber risks associated with all data processing activities,
3. Third-party tools and solutions for information security and privacy management are also available,
4. Alternatively, you can seek the advice of a third-party service provider to gain a better understanding of information security and assist you in achieving compliance.

2. Identify the data you are collecting and processing

To understand cyber security compliance requirements, you need to identify what data resides in your information security management systems. Based upon the type of information, i.e. PII, PHI PC,I or any sensitive information, identify applicable regulations and cybersecurity standards necessary to protect the identified information set.

3. Conduct necessary risk assessments for critical assets

Organisations of all sizes must engage in risk assessment processes, as increasing standards and evolving regulations emphasise a risk-based approach to compliance rather than a control-based one. Risk assessment is usually composed of the following activities:

Identify the risk

Identify all critical information assets, as well as information systems, networks, and devices that are subject to cybersecurity compliance requirements. Several exercises, such as PCI penetration testing or vulnerability scanning, could be helpful in initial risk identification.

Assess the risk

Examine the level of risk associated with each data category. Determine where high-risk information is stored, transmitted, and collected, and assign a risk rating to those sites.

Analyse the risk

You must analyse the risk after you have assessed it. Organisations have traditionally used the following formula:

(Probability of threat x Impact)/Cost = Risk

Choose a risk tolerance strategy

After assessing it, you must decide whether to transmit, refuse, accept, or mitigate the risk.

4. Deploy organisational and technical controls

After deciding your risk tolerance methodology, based on that, you need to choose defensive and preventive technical controls as well as defence in-depth strategy to minimise the occurrence of the risk. Controls may include the following:

1. Encryption
2. Access controls
3. Antivirus
4. IDS/IPS or SIEM
5. Data backups
6. Vendor risk assessment
7. Password management
8. Patch management
9. Network security
10. Physical security

5. Implement information security policies

When you create policies, you ensure that the policies you deploy comply with cybersecurity. Your policies will document your compliance efforts and controls, laying the groundwork for any necessary internal or external audits. These information security policies will include the following:

1. Acceptable use policy
2. Access control policy
3. Change management policy
4. Incident response policy
5. Remote access policy
6. Business continuity and disaster recovery plan
7. Email/Communication policy
8. Data protection policy

6. Monitoring and Review

All the cybersecurity compliance requirements revolve around how the cyber threat landscape evolves. Cybercriminals are constantly looking for new ways to steal information. Rather than looking for new vulnerabilities, known as Zero-Day Attacks, they prefer to exploit existing ones. 

They may, for example, combine two different types of known ransomware malware to create a new one.

Continuous monitoring assists in the detection of new risks. The objective of a compliance program is to detect and respond to these dangers before they cause a data breach.

Consequences of non-compliance

Organisations of all sizes are impacted by data protection and privacy rules. If you have customers or employees, you have data that must be protected under some state or federal regulation.

Such regulations are meant to guarantee that sufficient measures have been taken to protect potential victims of cybercrimes such as fraud or identity theft caused by malicious actors getting access to data via hacking, technological failure, or human error. 

Unauthorised data access as a result of noncompliance with cybersecurity standards can cause challenges for organisations, such as:

1. Lawsuits
2. Bank fines
3. Audits by governing authorities
4. Remediation and compensation cost
5. Lost revenue/ reputation

Book a no obligation call with our team to explore our cyber security compliance services to stay compliant. 

Conclusion

This blog explains how to achieve cybersecurity compliance with multiple regulations and cybersecurity frameworks. As you learnt, it’s essential to know how to create an effective cybersecurity compliance plan for any type of organisation.

When you implement your security controls appropriately, compliance becomes a byproduct of your data security. As cybersecurity evolves, your company must have the necessary solutions to ensure compliance. As cybersecurity compliance is required for organisations across many industries, why not join the revolution in improving your cybersecurity landscape and preventing unforeseen cyber-attacks by creating a compliance plan today?

Get in touch for a casual chat to discuss your concerns and learn more.