Meet regulatory standards with GitLab security and compliance

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:

Common IT compliance standards
Global and regional compliance standards
- Country/regional regulations
- Industry-specific standards
Importance of continuous compliance
Regulatory compliance vs. self-imposed standards
Compliance management
Compliance management with GitLab
Best practices for compliance management
Learn more

Common IT compliance standards

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.

HIPAA

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.

NIST SSDF

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.

PCI DSS

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 27000

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.

Global and regional compliance standards

Country/regional regulations

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:

SOX (USA, Public companies): Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Mandates proper financial record-keeping and reporting for public companies.
PIPEDA (Canada, Commercial businesses): Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. Governs how private sector organizations collect, use, and disclose personal information.
PDPA (Singapore, All organizations): Personal Data Protection Act. Governs the collection, use, and disclosure of personal data by organizations.
APPI (Japan, All industries): Act on the Protection of Personal Information. Regulates the use of personal information in Japan.
LGPD (Brazil, All industries): Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados. Brazil's data protection law is similar to GDPR.
FISMA (USA, Federal agencies): Federal Information Security Management Act. Defines a framework for managing information security for federal information systems.
POPI Act (South Africa, All sectors): The Protection of Personal Information Act promotes the protection of personal information processed by public and private bodies.
PDPA (Thailand, All sectors): Personal Data Protection Act. Like GDPR, it regulates the collection, use, and disclosure of personal data in Thailand.
PIPL (China, All sectors): Personal Information Protection Law. China's first comprehensive data protection law is similar to GDPR.
NDPR (Nigeria, All sectors): Nigeria Data Protection Regulation. Safeguards the rights of natural persons to data privacy.
DIFC Data Protection Law (Dubai, Companies in Dubai International Financial Centre): Regulates the processing of personal data in the DIFC free zone.
PDPA (Malaysia, Commercial transactions): Personal Data Protection Act. Regulates the processing of personal data in commercial transactions.
Privacy Act (Australia, Government agencies, and some private sector organizations) regulates how personal information is handled by Australian government agencies and some private sector organizations.
KVKK (Turkey, All sectors): Turkish Personal Data Protection Law. Regulates the processing of personal data and protects individual rights.

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.

Industry-specific standards

PCI DSS (Financial Services): The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard applies to all organizations that handle credit card information globally.
ISO 27001 (All industries) is an Information Security Management System standard that provides a framework for information security management practices.
GAMP 5 (Pharmaceutical): Good Automated Manufacturing Practice. Guidelines for computerized systems in pharmaceutical manufacturing.
ISO 13485 (Medical Devices): Specifies requirements for a quality management system for medical device manufacturers.
COBIT (IT Management): Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies. Framework for IT management and IT governance.
ITIL (IT Services) is an Information Technology Infrastructure Library, a set of detailed practices for IT service management.
NIST CSF (Cybersecurity): National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework. Guidance on managing and reducing cybersecurity risk.
WCAG (Web Accessibility): The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines aim to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities.
Basel III (Banking) is the international regulatory framework for banks, including IT risk management requirements.
TISAX (Automotive): Trusted Information Security Assessment Exchange. Information security assessment and exchange mechanism for the automotive industry. (Learn how GitLab's TISAX certification helps customers in the automotive industry.)

These standards apply across national boundaries to specific industries or aspects of IT, ensuring consistent practices and security measures globally within their respective domains.

Importance of continuous compliance

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 vs. self-imposed standards

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.

Compliance management

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.

Compliance management with GitLab

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.

Compliance frameworks and pipelines

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 policy management

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

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

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

License approval 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

Audit management

Preparing for audits

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:

Determine which regulations or standards will be assessed and what areas of the organization will be examined.
Analyze past audit results and ensure any previously identified issues have been addressed.
Collect all relevant policies, procedures, and records that demonstrate compliance.
Before the official audit, an internal audit must be performed to identify and address any potential compliance gaps.
Brief employees on the audit process and their roles. Conduct training if necessary.
Ensure all required documentation is easily accessible and well-organized.
Ensure all compliance-related policies and procedures are up-to-date and aligned with current regulations.
Verify that all technical safeguards and controls are in place and functioning correctly.
Identify key personnel who may be interviewed and brief them on potential questions.
Address known issues: If any known compliance issues exist, develop and document plans to address them.

To enable your preparedness, GitLab features: Audit Events and Compliance Center give a detailed view of an organization's compliance.

Using GitLab audit logs effectively

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.

Audit events

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.

Meet regulatory requirements - image 2

Example of a compliance violations report from a parent GitLab group.

Meet regulatory requirements - image 3

Example of a compliance framework report for all projects in a group

Audit events streaming

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.

Best practices for compliance management

Here are some best practices for effective compliance management:

Establish a strong compliance culture that promotes organizational compliance awareness and ensures leadership commitment and support.
Develop a comprehensive compliance program with clear policies and procedures and regularly review the program to reflect regulation changes.
Implement risk assessment and management to regularly identify and assess compliance risks, prioritizing risks based on potential impact and likelihood.
Conduct regular compliance training tailored to specific roles and responsibilities for all employees.
Implement compliance management to automate compliance monitoring and compliance reporting where possible.
Perform internal audits to identify gaps and areas for improvement. It is also essential to consider external audits unbiasedly and use audit results to refine and improve compliance processes.
Stay informed about regulatory changes by assigning responsibility for monitoring regulatory updates and participating in industry associations and forums.
Integrate compliance into business processes, embed compliance checks into operational workflows, and consider compliance implications in strategic decision-making. Align compliance goals with business objectives
Develop response plans for potential compliance breaches and conduct mock scenarios to test readiness for incidents and violations.

Learn more

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.

Meet regulatory standards with GitLab security and compliance