Control maintenance summary and conclusion

Keeping your controls healthy is the key to managing a successful compliance program. It's easy to tell if a control is healthy:

Five factors make up the health of a control: testing, implementation, freshness, proof, and past due issues. For a control to be healthy, it must be effective, implemented, up-to-date, and contain at least one piece of linked proof. To ensure your controls remain healthy, it's recommended to establish recurring reviews for each of them. Control owners can choose how they want to conduct these reviews by using Hyperproof features like tasks and freshness. Linking controls to a program's requirements ensures that the requirements are being met.

Hyperproof's control assessment feature allows organizations to fully assess the design, language, effectiveness, and reliability of its controls. There are several reasons to perform control assessments regularly. The most obvious might be that it’s much better to find problems with your controls’ operation and fix them before they take you by surprise on an audit report. However, being proactive about your control design and operation is even more important for keeping organizational risks under control and maintaining security, since the process helps you find and fix issues much sooner.

Moving towards continuous compliance operations (ComOps)

Good control maintenance is the cornerstone for continuous ComOps. When controls are linked to their respective requirements, audits run more smoothly. This is because the main purpose of controls is to help your organization meet its program requirements. Without controls, it's highly unlikely that an organization can successfully meet its program requirements.

Remember, continuous ComOps is control-centric. Following the continuous ComOps methodology reduces your organization's chance of experiencing security and compliance lapses because you're making continuous improvements on a cadence—not trying to do everything at once.