It’s not adding up: Businesses are falling farther behind in security and compliance efforts even as they make great strides in digitally transforming their businesses. The modern IT environment — encompassing hybrid clouds and multiclouds — is exceedingly difficult to contain within traditional compliance boundaries.

The cost of noncompliance and security drift can produce staggering regulatory fines and data breaches. What’s more, trying to address these issues with a hodgepodge of point solutions and manual processes is soaking up critical resources that could fund innovation efforts.

Over the past decade, businesses have been required to comply with a seemingly ever-expanding regime of regulations, ranging from data privacy to anti-money-laundering to securing healthcare-related information.

More regulations are assuredly on the way. For example, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission recently announced “proposed rule changes that would require registrants to include certain climate-related disclosures in their registration statements and periodic reports, including information about climate-related risks that are reasonably likely to have a material impact on their business, results of operations, or financial condition…”

The challenge is enormous, but so is the cost of inaction. Financial crimes compliance alone cost U.S. and Canadian companies more than $57 billion from early 2021 to early 2022, up 14% over the previous 12-month period.

What’s the solution?

Increasingly, business leaders are looking to IT to help manage the morass of compliance requirements. The State of the CIO 2023 report found that 70% of CIOs expect their involvement in cybersecurity to increase over the coming year, and 55% expect their involvement in data privacy and compliance to increase.

Too often, though, IT is handcuffed by a preponderance of point solution tools and manual processes that simply can’t keep up with the need. Many organizations are clearly struggling to manage existing infrastructure and adopt new technology while ensuring that they are maintaining the highest levels of compliance. With today’s hybrid IT environments, it is harder than ever to gain an integrated view into security and compliance from development through operations.

That’s why Kyndryl is providing businesses with a compliance-as-a-service option that ensures an integrated view into security and compliance from development through operations, an approach it calls ComplianceSecOps.

The value proposition behind ComplianceSecOps is simple: decrease the cost of being compliant and decrease the cost of not being compliant. One report estimates that the impact of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on companies doing business in the EU resulted in an average 8% drop in profits, due to a combination of increased compliance costs and dampening e-commerce demand.

To get on top of compliance, IT teams must be able to continually monitor their company’s cloud security posture, protect cloud-native applications, and implement a workload-centric zero-trust model. That requires continuous monitoring and reporting of data in an easy-to-consume format that simplifies and advances governance.

With more than 4,500 customers worldwide in virtually every industry, Kyndryl has the insight and the experience to help organizations understand, modernize, and fully manage their compliance efforts cost-effectively.

To learn more about Kyndryl Services, click here.