Quarter Of IT Leaders Unsure Of Regulatory Compliance Needs

IT managers are unsure of which regulatory frameworks their organisations need to align to, and feel that managing compliance should rather be done by C-level management.

These are a couple of the findings from Pulsant, after the hybrid cloud solution provider surveyed more than 200 IT decision makers, C-level executives and compliance officers last month.

The survey comes amid growing concern at the arrival of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) regulations, and previous surveys have found that many organisations are not confident they will be able to comply with the new data protection laws.

Compliance headache

Indeed, the Pulsant report found that managing compliance remains a real headache for IT management teams.

So much so that 33 percent of IT decision makers believe managing compliance is the responsibility of the C-level management.

And one in three (28 percent) IT decision makers don’t know which regulatory frameworks their organisations need to align to .

This is despite the fact that GDPR compliance is expected in May this year.

It seems that compliance is much more serious issue for IT management than many would have first thought. The survey found that 40 percent of IT management see maintaining compliance as a major issue, while 43 percent say managing it is a problem.

IT management are also contending with other challenges including lack of time, budget and skills shortages. For example 17 percent of budgets allocated to managing compliance.

“Compliance itself is a challenge that nearly every business faces, an endeavour compounded by lack of budget, understanding and resources,” said Javid Khan, CTO of LayerV, a Pulsant company. “And it is not something that’s over once compliance has been reached; maintaining that compliance is another major challenge considering how quickly the market shifts, regulations change and businesses evolve.”

The vast majority of IT managers (83 percent) said there was room for improvement when it comes to the tools and technologies used in managing compliance. The features most requested are real-time alerts, better reporting, open integration with other compliance tools, and more comprehensive monitoring capabilities.

“One of the telling things in the research is that the same approaches are used for both achieving and maintaining IT compliance, yet challenges remain, “said Khan. “This signals the need for a change in approach when it comes to maintaining compliance, whether that means better tools, more automation or working with a partner to manage the entire process.”

Compliance assistance

And some firms are still stuck in the compliance slow lane, with 14 percent still using manual processes to maintain compliance.

Yet a number of cloud service providers nowadays offer solutions for organisations to comply with regulatory compliance, whatever their particular sector and data compliance requirements.

One of these is Pulsant, which had a busy time in 2017. It ploughed £1 million into an upgrade project for its South Yorkshire data centre last year for example.

But it also expanded its South London facility with the opening of a 400 square metre data centre hall as part of a £20 million investment across the entire site.

Quiz: What do you know about the cloud in 2017?