Regulatory standards and acts businesses, hospitals, and other organizations must comply with?
Answers
Regulatory compliance is a big focus for big businesses today. Privacy concerns are driving government regulation, and some industries are proactively adopting their own privately enforced rules in an effort to head off further government interference.
Enterprises are in the spotlight and can’t afford to have their household names associated with violation of government and industry requirements. But what about small and medium sized businesses?
Small and medium sized businesses face special challenges and situations as new laws bring more and more of them into the regulatory arena, where they must navigate a maze of mandates laid out in confusing and sometimes vague legal jargon that makes it hard to even understand what the requirements are and whether they apply to you, much less how to meet them.
But meet them you must. Fines for failure to comply with federal and international regulations such as The U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) can cost your company thousands or even millions of dollars.
The GDPR imposes fines for non-compliance that can be as high as 20 million Euros (almost $23 million USD as of the date of this writing) or 4 percent of your annual global turnover (revenues), whichever is highest.
The damage to your organization’s reputation may be even more expensive, and the disruption of business operations with resultant lost productivity and lost revenues can be costly, as well. According to a Ponemon Institute study, The True Cost of Compliance with Data Protection Regulations, “The consequence of not managing compliance risks include a loss of trust that will jeopardize customer loyalty, and the inability to deliver services and products causing revenues to decline. Beyond the economic impact, non-compliance increases the risk of losing valuable information assets such as intellectual property, physical property and customer data.”
Unfortunately for SMBs, both the likelihood that your organization will fall short in complying with regulatory requirements and the ramifications of being out of compliance can be even greater than for large enterprises.