Imagine this: no more grinding out a checklist to complete your compliance, but rather a streamlined approach combining tech with human experience to provide compliance without the complexity. Seems strange, doesn’t it? Well, not with AssuranceLab’s approach.

We often see companies racing to their compliance outcome; using templates and a generic checklist of to-do items. We call this the “box-ticking method”. It’s a lot of effort and results in hard-coded practices that slow you down, cause 'growing pains', and create more work for your team trying to maintain it. It’s like buying a suit that doesn’t fit. It might get you to the party a little earlier; but it’s less comfortable, harms your posture and feels more restrictive as the night goes on.

So before you tackle that 80+ item checklist, or prepare 25 policies that are less accurate than the forecasts in your pitch deck. There’s one key concept that will save you a ton of time and get the best results from your hard efforts.

Think about your compliance scope. How many cloud services do you use? 10? 20? 100? Possibly more?!

If you take the box-ticking path, you might end up with all of these in your vendor register and a Vendor Management Policy that says you conduct security reviews on every single one of them. Imagine that…!

Then your Access Control Policy says you document approvals for all access granted and review the access to each system every quarter. For 100 cloud services… 

We haven’t even touched on the data, infrastructure, components of your software, people and/or processes. It all adds up, fast! 

But it’s not just about the hard work involved in box-ticking compliance. The other classic symptom of box-ticking compliance is nobody in your company cares about it. When employees have to sign off the policies, complete security training, or confirm they're using devices solely for business purposes; it all becomes like those T&Cs you click past on autopilot.

That’s when compliance becomes the joke that nobody finds funny.

If you start a risk register with 50 risks, you’ll talk in circles for hours and lose the audience in your first risk assessment meeting.

If you document 20+ page policies, your employees won't actually read them or take away the key points that matter. They won’t be maintained properly as you grow and evolve. They won’t be a reliable reference point, so they become useless.

If you put 300 cloud services in the vendor register; you’ll miss the most important risks and dependencies that matter. 

And if you try to implement 200 compliance controls you’ll spin the wheels, delay your first compliance outcomes, and then realise it’s unrealistic to maintain it all leading to issues in the future.

Doing less isn’t just about saving time. It’s also about making compliance meaningful. Spending time where it drives greater consistency and operational benefits. Peace of mind in your state of security. Ease of satisfying enterprise expectations with a clear and confident focus on managing the most important risks. 

When we say ‘do less’ we aren’t saying compliance is not important, in fact, it’s the opposite. What we are saying is that the way to achieve the best outcome is to ‘do less’, and do that well.

Do less to achieve more with AssuranceLab.