As data and information grow increasingly valuable, businesses face a complex landscape of privacy and security regulations. Compliance with privacy laws is not merely a legal obligation but a strategic imperative for any successful business.
Therefore, building trust with customers and providing security for their personal information is not just a legal requirement, but a critical factor in maintaining a competitive edge.
By implementing robust compliance measures, businesses can mitigate these risks and demonstrate their commitment to customer privacy. However, this involves understanding the specific standards and requirements of the regions and industries in which you operate, developing practical controls and finding the right tools to help manage it all.
Below, we’ll discuss how NetSuite can help you protect your customers’ privacy rights, navigate global compliance regulations and fit into a sustainable compliance framework in an ever-evolving regulatory environment.
Evolving Regulatory Landscape
Governments have enacted numerous laws and standards designed to protect individuals’ personal information. Laws vary by region but share a common goal: privacy and control.
In the United States, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) requires that healthcare providers, insurers, and billing companies uphold the privacy and security of patients’ information, disclosing it only for treatment, payment, or other permitted purposes or with the patient’s authorization.
HIPAA violation cases have included impermissible uses of personal health information, lack of notice of privacy practices, workforce training failures, noncompliance with audit control standards, lack of contingency planning and failure to protect information shared with third parties. Fines are based on the motivation and seriousness of the violation. If a rule is violated due to a lack of knowledge, the civil penalty could range from over $100 to tens of thousands of dollars. If it’s due to neglect and not rectified within 30 days, it could run over $2 million per violation.
Other notable privacy laws that affect businesses include the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Brazil’s LGPD and Canada’s PIPEDA, which emphasize consent, accountability, transparency and data minimization. In today’s regulatory environment, where privacy laws are shaping global business practices, the right software solution is essential to support compliance, mitigate risks and maintain a strong reputation.
Company Culture
Compliance needs to be integrated deep into the company’s overarching business culture, strategy and workflows to ensure the greatest adherence. Otherwise, requirements can be viewed as work disruptions and impediments to business performance.
The foundation of a successful compliance program is crucial to driving this initiative. Embedded in your business, it begins with a dedicated team that brings together expertise from legal, IT, finance, and operations to set and communicate standards, policies, training and tools to guide employees. Compliance officers, who advocate and engage their board members and peers in senior management about the business value of compliance, foster a culture of support and awareness to secure necessary resources and further integrate the compliance function throughout the organization.
Periodic Review
Dedicated compliance management software systems continuously monitor for gaps and trends in regulatory adherence. But to keep up with rapidly emerging risks, companies conduct periodic audits and systematic reviews to comply with regulations and determine the need to revise policies, procedures and practices.
Annual internal audits can help companies find potential gaps or violations before regulators do. Findings, results and recommendations can help teams shape compliance roadmaps and stay current. For verification and re-certification, regulators often conduct their own routine inspections and random audits. In all cases, a successful outcome depends on advanced preparation, such as gathering all documentation on policies, control procedures, training records and performance metrics.
Monitoring and Managing Compliance Risks With NetSuite
NetSuite, as an ERP system, provides a centralized platform for managing complex business processes and data, since it’s able to store sensitive financial, customer, patient, product and manufacturing information. Since it manages such a broad range of organizational data, NetSuite is the ideal central hub for simplifying compliance.
Once you build a compliance framework — the regulations you must follow, as well as the policies and workflows needed to comply with them — NetSuite can help you embed those policies and processes into automated workflows, which can reduce issues significantly.
Built-In Tools and Features
- Audit trails: NetSuite tracks the history of data — who accessed, updated or deleted it and when. This functionality is particularly crucial for businesses that require robust compliance and data integrity, especially in highly regulated industries such as finance, healthcare and government.
- Data security: Multi-factor authentication is available for all organizations using NetSuite. It enforces an extra layer of security to the NetSuite user interface and can help you comply with IT security standards. IP address restrictions can also help businesses control access to NetSuite data, blocking access attempts from unapproved systems and locations. To help customers address privacy regulations related to data subject requests, users can employ NetSuite’s Personal Information (PI) Removal feature that enables the appropriate permissions to remove personal information from NetSuite fields, records and audit logs.
- Role-based access: Controls help businesses protect sensitive company data, allowing access based on roles set for different users is a prime example. With NetSuite, administrators can define granular roles and permissions to help ensure employees only access data relevant to their job functions. For example, does the person responsible for managing inventory need to see a customer’s payment history or company financials? Giving employees access to only the data they need, and nothing more, allows everyone to do their jobs, while also helping to protect company assets and customer privacy.
Next Level Compliance
Businesses that work with sensitive customer or patient data often face even more complex compliance requirements and audits. Specialized reporting tools like NetSuite Compliance 360 can help you proactively manage your business’s diverse compliance obligations instead of reacting to deadlines, audits and security breaches.
- Activity log: Compliance 360 captures and logs activity on customer records and associated transactions, providing details as to which user accessed the record, what action took place and when. IP addresses are tracked to help compliance managers identify where the user connected to the system, and URLs are provided, linking back to the record or saved search to help verify what data was seen. This focused report can help compliance officers identify where compliance efforts may have broken down.
The difference between a detailed activity log and an audit log is that audit logs focus on transactions that have been added, changed or deleted. The activity log in Compliance 360 provides officers with details to customer records that have been accessed including: viewed, printed, searched, exported, edited and deleted. - Automated reporting: Compiling reports on interactions with private information and monitoring user activity can be challenging. The Compliance 360 dashboard illustrates activity metrics in easy-to-read formats for quick at-a-glance automated insights.
Interactive charts and graphs help managers visualize frequent activity by customer and user, reducing the time it takes to review. Highlighted KPIs help compliance officers proactively monitor data access to catch threats before data breaches get out of control. - Audit tracking: Internal and external audits are required for compliance with rules and regulations and accountability. While they tend to take a considerable amount of time and energy to complete, features available in Compliance 360 can help speed up the process.
Templates for common regulatory reviews can keep the team on task and support audit readiness. A centralized location for findings, certifications, controls, and testing facilitates transparency and keeps information at hand for easy retrieval and reference.
Better Compliance Management
Compliance can feel like a moving target, especially in sectors like healthcare, finance and ecommerce. But where compliance and risk management are top priorities and data is both an asset and a liability, NetSuite customers have a unique advantage — an integrated suite of modules. This unified architecture allows for coherent and consistent data security efforts and provides a centralized view of compliance-related activities.
NetSuite can’t determine the regulations your company is subject to, but it can help you manage compliance and make it easier to automate controls, monitor activity and execute audits. Tools like NetSuite Compliance 360 make it easier to track compliance on a regular basis, which helps your company protect privacy, champion transparency and foster long-term customer trust.
Need Help?
If you have questions about compliance management with NetSuite, contact us online or give us a call at 410.685.5512.
