Academy

Cloud Compliance 101: Checklist & Overview | anecdotes

Yair Kuznitsov
March 28, 2024
Explore this guide to cloud Compliance from the experts at anecdotes

Organizational SaaS Platforms ✅

You use plenty of SaaS products in every department. These products hold valuable data for your compliance controls and, therefore, are critical to you. The HR or R&D departments don’t care about compliance so instead of chasing your colleagues, you should simply have access to the relevant information.

Cloud Infrastructure ✅

Whether your company is cloud-native or hybrid, the Cloud Infrastructure you’re using is an important asset for your Compliance program. However, finding the right pieces of evidence in these complicated platforms is extremely hard. A good solution will cover the gap between DevOps engineers and Compliance managers by dictating which pieces of evidence should be collected from this critical infrastructure.

Security Products ✅

EDRs, CSPMs, Email Security, Vulnerability Management, etc. and most of the security products you’re using are great (we hope!) and have a “Compliance solution” that will help you generate the right report for Compliance. But these tools only give you a part of the bigger picture. To establish a consistently and sustainably compliant environment, rely on anecdotes to gather, normalize and map this data to every Compliance requirement.

GRC Systems ❌

Are you a fan of RSA-Archer? Logic Manager? What about other legacy GRC solutions? No?

We hear you; These systems are too complex and require extensive setup and maintenance from your side. You need a platform that’s relevant to your SaaS and Cloud tech-stack and works for you!

Checklists ❌

They call them the “necessary evil” and require you to fulfill them over and over again, which causes a huge evidence collection overhead. After all, these checklists all contain the same essence, but each one has its own complex jargon which changes from one framework to another. You deserve a unified framework that saves you repetitive work and provides you with broader visibility to your status. Manage your Compliance by its essence, not with routine checklists.

Screenshots ❌

No. Not anymore.  I hope you never take another screenshot (not for evidence collection purposes, anyway).

It’s manual and may satisfy some auditors but you and I both know this is the old way—and not the right way. Data evidence is more reliable, more scalable and always up-to-date.

Static Reports ❌

“Which columns do I need?”

“Hey pal, can you do me a favor and generate the same report again? I know I asked for it last month, but ...”

Sorry but this is not the way to go. You can’t keep this ping-pong going, especially if you want to scale.

Policy Documents ✅ ❌

Policies help us establish one coherent standard for the company. Whether it’s a password / privacy / secure development / other policy, maintaining them will help you. But how can you efficiently reflect that these policies are consistently reviewed, maintained and approved? Collecting metadata like changes and access logs are yet another burden that can be solved.

Data Evidence ✅

Exactly what you’d expect it to be.

Real Data. Automatically collected. Always updated. Mapped to every compliance requirement. Accredited by your auditors.

Audit Fatigue ❌

When every audit preparation process drags on for weeks filled mostly with evidence collection legwork, and you’ve got multiple audits per year, it’s no wonder you get the same worthless results. In your job, you should be able to focus on managing and mitigating infosec compliance related risks, and assume accurate and up-to-date data.

Infosec Frameworks ✅

External frameworks (PCI-DSS / SOC 2 / ISO 27k / ITGC / etc.) are important when it comes to gaining trust from customers, and some tier-1 vendors even require Compliance with their own frameworks. In addition, many organizations have their own internal frameworks to make sure they meet their security standards.

With anecdotes’ unified controls that can be automatically satisfied, you’ll have all the data you need to easily establish a world-class InfoSec Compliance empire.

Evidence Catalogue ❌

Maintaining a folder with the “latest evidence” to be used again later is how you silently admit you actually do need evidence that is up-to-data—but the burden of re-collecting it is too high, so you find hacks to ease the process. Real, continuously up-to-date data is the foundation for a Compliance source of truth.

Yair Kuznitsov
Tech geek who appreciates and enjoys a good piece of code, Co-Founder and CEO of anecdotes.