Updated on: August 22, 2024
15 min read
Compliance is more than one-off audits; it's a continuous process of managing risk by implementing guardrails and monitoring specific metrics. Learn how with this comprehensive guide.
Guiding principles in the form of standards have consistently ensured the secure and reliable delivery of products and services to customers. These standards, typically enforced by legally mandated organizations, regulate industries and prevent the spread of subpar products.
In the Information Technology (IT) sector, adhering to standards extends beyond the final product delivery; it encompasses the entire solution lifecycle. As every industry increasingly leverages various forms of technology to accelerate processes and boost efficiency, vast quantities of often sensitive data are generated, stored, and transmitted using IT tools and services. The improper handling of this data can cause severe consequences, potentially leading to financial losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
This comprehensive guide explains global compliance standards and walks through how to meet regulatory standards with GitLab compliance and security policy management.
Article contents:
Regulatory compliance standards take various forms and depend on the industry or region in which an organization operates. First, we will look at common compliance standards, followed by region and industry-specific standards.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is important legislation that has impacted the healthcare industry in the U.S. The main aim of HIPAA, passed in 1996, is to protect sensitive patient health information from being disclosed without the patient's consent or knowledge.
It is essential to safeguard patient privacy, ensure data security, and standardize electronic healthcare transactions. HIPAA has forced healthcare providers, insurers, and related entities to implement strict data protection measures, significantly reducing unauthorized access to medical records and enhancing patient trust.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a significant European Union law that governs the protection of personal data. Implemented in 2018, GDPR establishes strict guidelines for organizations handling the personal information of EU residents. It grants individuals greater control over their data, including the right to access, rectify, and erase personal information held by companies. GDPR mandates that organizations obtain explicit consent before collecting or processing personal data and clearly explain the purpose of data collection. Non-compliance can result in substantial financial penalties.
Although an EU regulation, GDPR has global implications, affecting any organization that processes EU residents' data. This legislation has prompted widespread changes in data handling practices and has heightened awareness of privacy issues worldwide.
The NIST Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF) is a guide to help organizations make safer software. Created by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, it offers basic practices for secure software development.
The SSDF focuses on four main areas: getting the organization ready, protecting the software, making well-secured software, and dealing with vulnerabilities. It helps companies think about security, including security protocols, during development and throughout the software supply chain.
By following these guidelines, organizations can create software with fewer weak points and handle problems more effectively. The SSDF is flexible and can work with different software development methods, making it useful for many organizations.
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of security rules for organizations that handle credit card information. Created by major credit card companies, it aims to protect cardholders' data and prevent fraud. PCI DSS requires businesses to build and maintain a secure network, protect cardholder data, use strong access control measures, regularly monitor and test networks, and maintain an information security policy. These rules apply to any company that accepts, processes, stores, or transmits credit card data.
Compliance with PCI DSS is mandatory for these businesses, regardless of their size or transaction volume. By following these standards, companies can better safeguard sensitive financial information, reduce the risk of data breaches, and maintain customer trust. Regular audits ensure ongoing compliance with these important security measures.
ISO/IEC 27000 provides the foundational framework for the ISO/IEC 27000 family of standards, offering a comprehensive overview of information security management systems (ISMS). It establishes a standardized vocabulary by defining key terms and concepts, ensuring consistent understanding across organizations in the field of information security.
The standard outlines the core components and processes to establish and maintain an effective ISMS. This guidance enables organizations to systematically manage information security risks, protecting confidential data and intellectual property.
Adherence to ISO/IEC 27000 allows organizations to build a robust ISMS, enhancing their resilience against cyber threats, safeguarding valuable information assets, and fostering stakeholder trust.
Learn how GitLab can help you on your ISO 27001 compliance journey.
While compliance standards like HIPAA and GDPR are known globally, they are USA and EU standards respectively. They influence other regional standards around the globe but are only required for companies to adhere to where they handle data from, for example, the EU. Several countries have compliance standards that must be met if a company operates in such countries. Here are a few other country-specific standards:
These standards reflect the growing global concern for data privacy and security. Many countries are developing their own frameworks inspired by established regulations like GDPR. Each standard is tailored to the specific legal, cultural, and economic context of its country.
These standards apply across national boundaries to specific industries or aspects of IT, ensuring consistent practices and security measures globally within their respective domains.
Organizations need to implement systems that ensure compliance with relevant regulatory requirements and can achieve this with continuous compliance. Continuous software compliance is essential to every industry, as it provides ongoing monitoring, assessment, and adjustment of an organization's systems, processes, and practices to ensure they consistently meet relevant standards and regulations.
Continuous compliance is not just a regulatory checkbox but a strategic necessity for software development today. It empowers organizations to proactively navigate emerging threats, technological shifts, and regulatory changes while fostering stakeholder trust, operational efficiency, and competitive advantage in an increasingly complex business environment.
Regulatory compliance and self-imposed standards are two distinct approaches to organizational governance. Regulatory compliance involves adhering to mandatory laws and regulations set by external authorities, which have a broad scope and potential legal consequences for non-compliance. It focuses on meeting minimum legal requirements and is generally less flexible. Examples include GDPR, HIPAA, and SOX.
In contrast, self-imposed standards are voluntary guidelines adopted by organizations to improve quality, security, or performance. These can be tailored to specific needs, are highly adaptable, and typically aim to exceed minimum requirements. While failure to meet self-imposed standards may impact reputation, it usually doesn't have legal ramifications. The key differences lie in their origin, motivation, adaptability, and scope. Many organizations implement both approaches to create a comprehensive quality, security, and performance management strategy.
To meet standards, organizations must evaluate the right compliance metrics and integrate them into their standard operating procedures to provide insights that enable early detection and prevention of current and future compliance risks. Thus, there is a need for efficient compliance management. Compliance management goes beyond checking off a checklist periodically; it's a comprehensive organization-wide continuous process.
GitLab provides features that allow organizations to create compliance frameworks, security policies, and audit management. GitLab also enables compliance or leadership teams to monitor compliance metrics with compliance reports. Let's take a look at some of these features.
Organizations can create a compliance framework that identifies projects in GitLab that must meet defined compliance requirements, which can be enforced with compliance pipelines. For example, a FinTech company can create a default compliance framework for all projects, ensuring every stage of their software development lifecycle meets the PCI DSS requirements for handling cardholder data.
These requirements are then enforced by ensuring every change introduced to the codebase is sufficiently tested automatically with GitLab's application security features, which cover source code, dependencies, licenses, vulnerabilities in running application and infrastructure configurations. You can learn more about how GitLab helps you achieve PCI compliance and other regulatory compliance with compliance frameworks.
The following videos demonstrate setting up and using compliance frameworks and pipelines.
Video tutorial: Create compliance frameworks
Video tutorial: Enforce compliance pipelines
Security and compliance teams can use GitLab to enforce compliance requirements by ensuring security scanners run in certain pipelines or require approval on merge requests when security policies are violated. GitLab supports scan execution and scan result policies. These policies are defined in a dedicated security policy project that separates duties between security and development teams. Security policies can be applied granularly at the group, sub-group, and project levels. The policies can be edited in rule mode, which uses the policy editor, or by yaml mode.
Scan execution policies can be configured to run on a specified GitLab Runner, including the following:
The scan jobs can be run on schedule or anytime a pipeline runs. Compliance and security teams can use scan execution policies to periodically check on and proactively prevent vulnerability escalation as part of a vulnerability management strategy. They can also reinforce controls when new trends are observed from scan results.
Video tutorial: Set up security scan policies in GitLab
Scan result policies add required review and approval for merge requests when the results of specified security scans violate the policies' rules. For example, a policy can require a security team member to take action when a newly identified critical SAST vulnerability is detected. This way, security and compliance team members can support developers while ensuring the changes introduced to the codebase are secure and meet compliance requirements.
Video tutorial: Overview of GitLab Scan Result Policies
When selecting scan types for scan result policy rules, you can choose between security scan, the default behavior for scan result policies, and license scan, which helps ensure license compliance. License scanning depends on the output of the dependency scanning CI/CD job to check if identified licenses match specified criteria, then adds approval requirements before an open merge request can be merged. This is crucial to ensure that only dependencies with approved licenses are used in your organization.
Video demo: License approval policies
Audits are essential for compliance management because they allow you to understand your organization's security and compliance posture. External audits required by regulators are often detailed and exhaustive. To prepare for them, organizations need to:
To enable your preparedness, GitLab features: Audit Events and Compliance Center give a detailed view of an organization's compliance.
You want to know every action taken on the GitLab instance with audit events. Audit reports allow you to track every significant event, who performed it, and when. You can also generate detailed reports from audit events using audit reports, allowing you to prove your compliance to auditors or regulators.
The compliance center is a significant component of audit management in GitLab, giving visibility to your organization's compliance posture. Compliance reports detail every violation discovered with the compliance violations report and the frameworks used by projects within your organization with the compliance frameworks report.
Most organizations have existing systems to monitor activities in their systems in real-time. With audit events streaming on GitLab, you can integrate third-party solutions like Splunk infrastructure monitoring or DataDog streams monitoring service for real-time audit events analytics. All audit events data are sent to the streaming destination (it's essential to stream to a trusted service). Audit events streaming can be configured at top-level groups and at the instance level for self-managed GitLab instances.
Here are some best practices for effective compliance management:
Compliance is a continuous process of efficiently managing risk by implementing guardrails and monitoring compliance metrics. GitLab empowers organizations to fulfill regulatory standards with our compliance management features. With GitLab, you can improve the software supply chain experience, build more secure software faster, and maintain the trust of your users, clients, and community.
Learn more about compliance and security policy management with the GitLab DevSecOps tutorial, which contains lessons covering the complete application security lifecycle in GitLab.