What Is Compliance As A Service (CaaS)?

Mar 15

CaaS is a cloud service service level agreement (SLA) that specifies how a managed service provider (MSP) would assist an enterprise in meeting regulatory compliance standards. Large enterprises in highly regulated areas like healthcare, banking, and finance often employ cloud-based compliance support services. The purpose of Compliance as a Service is to relieve an organization's compliance load by delegating compliance management activities to a third-party with the resources necessary to satisfy regulatory standards more cost-effectively.

Customers of CaaS providers often have access to software and support materials that are tailored to comply with certain laws. This is because, depending on the organization's type of business and location, compliance problems express themselves in various ways. Consider the following scenario:

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) mandates that network administrators construct logical barriers between protected and unprotected operations in the healthcare industry.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) mandates specified encryption levels for several data types in the financial sector.
People and programs in retail must have a business rationale for accessing cardholder data under PCI-DSS.
In Europe, the EU Data Protection Act mandates that consumer data be maintained on European servers.
CaaS services often entail evaluating an organization's existing governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) initiatives and assisting the Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) in developing and managing rules that support best practices both on-premises and in the cloud. A CaaS provider's services must be transparent in order to be successful. Customers should be able to readily monitor the service and ensure that their information is being handled in compliance with legal requirements and business policy.

CaaS is a new sector, and reading through a cloud provider's SLAs and understanding what is truly being given may be perplexing for line of business (LOB) personnel. To establish confidence, certain CaaS providers will first get accredited for the legislation they support. Microsoft Azure, for example, has satisfied the requirements for 90 compliance certifications as of this writing. 50 of them are unique to certain nations and locations throughout the world.

Compliance As A Service Benefits

Compliance MSPs are in charge of keeping their cloud services up to date and maintained throughout time. If financial restrictions change, the supplier is accountable for modifying services in accordance with the customer's SLA. Because of this, Compliance as a Service may save a major corporation millions of dollars over time by lowering administrative costs.

Compliance As A Service's Drawbacks

Despite its advantages, compliance as a service has drawbacks, since cloud service consumers ultimately share risk with the supplier. There may be serious legal and financial consequences if a corporation fails to follow compliance requirements. If a financial penalty is imposed as a result of anything the cloud provider has done (or failed to do), the cloud customer (not the cloud provider) will be penalised, and it will be up to the cloud customer to seek reimbursement from the cloud provider via the legal system.

If a business intends to adopt Compliance as a Service, it needs do its homework to locate the suitable provider. While many CaaS providers provide compliance services for large standards like HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley, finding one in numerous vertical sectors and countries may be challenging.