Compliance and Assurance
Introduction
Many companies take steps to ensure that they comply with industry standards and regulations, as well as requiring individual business areas to meet the organisation’s own internal policies and standards/procedures. Compliance activity is then undertaken to check that these policies and standards are met.
What Is Compliance?
- 1. the action or fact of complying with a wish or command. "the ways in which the state maintains order and compliance"
- 2. the property of a material of undergoing elastic deformation or (of a gas) change in volume when subjected to an applied force. It is equal to the reciprocal of stiffness.
Compliance activity is generally carried out to confirm that a defined baseline standard of security is reached across the broad scope of an organisation. These baseline standards though do not necessarily ensure that systems, networks and assets meet the level of security required by the organisation or the individual business area, or that the security risk sits within the organisation’s risk appetite. Compliance alone will therefore not provide assurance that the organisation is secure, but rather that the policies and standards have been met. As such, compliance can become a ceiling rather than the baseline.
ASSURANCE, com. law. Insurance. (q.v.)
This is called a common assurance. But the term assurances includes, in an enlarged sense, all instruments which dispose of property, whether they be the grants of private persons, or not; such are fines and recoveries, and private acts of the legislature. Eunom.
What is ASSURANCE?
In conveyancing. A deed or instrument of conveyance. The legal evidences of the transfer of property are in England called the "common assurances" of the kingdom, whereby every man's estate is assured to him, and all controversies, doubts, and difficulties are either prevented or removed. 2 Bl. Comm. 294. State v. Farrand, 8 N. J. Law, 335. In contracts. A making secure; insurance. The term was formerly of very frequent use in the modern sense of insurance, particularly in English maritime law, and still appears in the policies of some companies, but is otherwise seldom seen of late years. There seems to be a tendency, however, to use assurance for the contracts of life insurance companies, and insurance for risks upon property. Assurance, further, covenant for. See COVENANT.