Compliance that Keeps Up with the Speed of Business

How Anecdotes and Google Cloud empower tech companies to innovate with confidence

The tech and software industry is all about rapid innovation and constant evolution. That applies to the regulatory landscape, too, which is constantly undergoing new developments, from data privacy to usage of new AI tools and technology. Pressured to keep up with the lightning speed of business and these evolving regulatory pressures, some tech companies see compliance as a hurdle to overcome rather than a strategic advantage.

But that doesn’t have to be the case. With the right tools and automation, compliance can instead become a business driver—accelerating your sales cycles, enhancing your market position, and mitigating cybersecurity risk. In fact, automated and continuous evidence collection can empower your organization to innovate with confidence and achieve remarkable growth, without sacrificing security.

In this eBook, you’ll learn:

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Compliance gridlock: 
Why traditional GRC is slowing you down

The tech space in particular faces several challenges when it comes to keeping up with compliance pressures.

Multiplying tech stacks and siloed data

Tech companies are constantly adopting new tools and technologies, expanding their tech stack, and increasing the complexity of their data security needs. In fact, the average organization has 291 tools in its tech stack¹. When you think about all of the data generated by those tools, and all of the different owners and business functions those tools sit in, you can see how difficult it becomes for GRC teams to maintain visibility and control over their compliance posture.

Evolving regulations

Then add to the mix how quickly regulations around topics like data privacy are evolving. In the US alone, 20 states have enacted comprehensive consumer data privacy laws, each with its own requirements and nuances². And the FTC has been keeping a close eye on tech companies’ usage of consumer data in new AI technologies, a new frontier for many organizations in the space³. GRC teams have to stay on top of all of these shifting regulations to ensure their customer data is being protected, without hindering innovation in new spaces like AI.

Staying abreast of these changes, understanding their implications, and adapting GRC strategies accordingly is a demanding process. But if GRC teams are instead bogged down with manually chasing down evidence, they may not have the time to fully understand these regulatory shifts, which could have outsized impacts downstream.

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Growing cybersecurity risks

Meanwhile, cybersecurity risks are on the rise. Data breaches can severely damage a tech company’s reputation and erode customer trust. The average total cost of a data breach in 2023 was $4.88M, a 10% increase from the previous year. And 46% of those breaches involved customer personal data⁴. To maintain trust in the market, GRC teams in the tech space have to proactively protect their company’s valuable data assets against potential breaches and assure customers that their data is secure.

Beyond that, ransomware and insider threats pose additional risks. GRC teams must constantly monitor the threat landscape, assess their organization’s vulnerabilities, and implement appropriate security controls—a daunting task for teams with limited resources.

Balancing speed and security

Finally, traditional compliance processes can feel like a constant tug-of-war between speed and security. Developers want to push code and innovate, while compliance teams are focused on mitigating risk. This friction can stifle creativity and slow down your time to market. For example, developers may feel frustrated by the time it takes to complete security reviews and compliance checks, while GRC teams may feel overwhelmed by the volume of manual tasks and the difficulty of keeping up with the latest regulations. Striking the right balance between these competing priorities is a constant challenge, often requiring GRC teams to make difficult decisions and trade-offs.

Reimagining compliance for the modern tech landscape

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1. Breaking down silos and bringing data together

Automated evidence collection eliminates manual tasks like tracking down documents and screenshots from various departments, freeing up both GRC teams and business owners. By integrating with various systems and centralizing GRC data, an automated compliance platform eliminates the need for GRC teams to chase down information from different sources, including all the various tools in your tech stack. This streamlines processes, reduces manual touchpoints, and accelerates compliance workflows.

With less time wasted on tedious tasks and improved collaboration, your GRC team can spend more time on higher value-added activities like risk assessment and mitigation, while business leaders can focus on critical go-to-market tasks.

2. Removing regulatory roadblocks

Through automated evidence collection and cross-mapping to all of your GRC use cases—from frameworks to controls and risks—your tech company can also effortlessly adapt to evolving compliance requirements as you grow and expand your operations. For instance, if your company is expanding into a new market with different data privacy regulations, an automated continuous compliance solution can help you quickly adapt to the new requirements without disrupting your business operations. With continuous automation, the work you do in one place is applied everywhere it’s relevant.

Automated compliance tools can also perform real-time checks, flagging potential regulatory issues before they become major problems.

3. Moving to a proactive security approach

A continuous automation approach to compliance also helps you shift from a reactive security posture to a proactive one. With an automated compliance solution integrated with your security tools, you can constantly monitor your environment, identify risks, and take action to mitigate them before they become security incidents, instead of being caught on the back foot after a breach has occurred.

4. Empowering developers while maintaining compliance

Imagine a world where compliance empowers developers instead of hindering them. By automating tedious tasks and providing real-time visibility into security posture, a data-first approach to compliance can free your developers to focus on what they do best: building amazing products. With the right tools, compliance becomes a seamless part of the development process, not a separate, cumbersome task. This means faster deployments, happier developers, and a more agile organization.

The future of compliance is here:
Anecdotes and Google Cloud

The constant pressure to innovate and the increasing complexity of compliance requirements can put immense strain on GRC teams in the tech industry. You need a solution that not only addresses these challenges but also empowers you to turn compliance into a strategic advantage. This is where Anecdotes and Google Cloud come in. 

Anecdotes is the only GRC platform that runs on actionable GRC data: raw systems data collected automatically and continuously from an organization’s tech stack and standardized for GRC use, without losing its integrity. This empowers tech companies to turn compliance into a business driver. By seamlessly integrating Anecdotes with Google Cloud, you get a comprehensive solution that streamlines compliance processes, strengthens your security posture, and accelerates your business growth.

With Anecdotes and Google Cloud, you can:

Accelerate time to market

In the fast-paced tech world, speed is everything. Anecdotes and Google Cloud help you get your products to market faster without compromising security. By automating evidence collection and cross-mapping to all GRC use cases, Anecdotes eliminates bottlenecks and empowers your development teams to deploy faster while maintaining continuous compliance on Google Cloud.

Gain real-time visibility into your compliance posture

Building trust with customers and partners is essential for any tech company. Anecdotes and Google Cloud help you build that trust with a strong compliance posture backed by actionable GRC data. Even with huge amounts of data, a multi-cloud environment, and a complex tech stack, you can quickly identify compliance and risk gaps in your program, and minimize their impact. Real-time visibility helps you proactively address risks, demonstrate your commitment to security, and win the confidence of your stakeholders.

Scale compliance effortlessly

As your tech company grows, so do your compliance requirements. Anecdotes and Google Cloud make it easy to scale compliance without breaking a sweat. The joint solution eliminates manual processes and frees up your GRC team to focus on strategic initiatives.

Customer spotlight

Snowflake, a cloud-based data warehousing company, was facing challenges with managing compliance across various frameworks. They needed a solution that could help them streamline their compliance processes and improve efficiency. Snowflake turned to Anecdotes, an automated compliance platform, to address these challenges.

With Anecdotes, Snowflake was able to automate the collection and organization of data for their GRC reports. This allowed them to gain valuable insights into their compliance posture and identify areas for improvement. As Mario Duarte, VP of Security at Snowflake, points out, “By leveraging Anecdotes’ compliance technology we unlocked data sets that can now be utilized in our compliance program enhancing efficiency and continuity. Their platform’s ability to bring credible data sets has been invaluable.”