What Does Compliance Mean?

Compliance is the adherence to a set of pre-notified legal agreements or established standards for services, goods, and/or processes. A compliance audit on suppliers or upstream in the supply chain may be conducted by the buyers or their agents to validate compliance. 

In other words, compliance ensures that business processes, products, and services are consistent with federal, state, and local regulations. 

Companies are increasingly implementing compliance software to streamline their agreement processes. It helps them ensure that they're staying up to date on the latest rules and regulations. 

Organizations sometimes maintain compliance data — all data associated with them or included in the law. These data can be used for compliance implementation or validation in a separate store for reporting purposes. Calculations, data transfers and audit trails may be included in this store. 

For example, one can enter the regulations they must comply with, and the software will tell if they're in compliance or if they need to update something. It will also help generate reports that can be used to demonstrate compliance. Best of all, compliance software makes it far easier to ensure that a company follows the regulations so that it can avoid fines and other expensive consequences.

There is, however, a wide variation in regulatory compliance, not only from industry to industry but also between regions, for example, the regulatory structures for finance, research, and pharmaceuticals. In many cases, the changes result from variations in objectives, industry requirements, and policy contexts in different countries, industries, and policy contexts, and so on.

Regarding regulatory compliance, International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is one of the primary international standards. ISO publishes international standards such as ISO/IEC 27002 to assist organizations in meeting compliance regulations in security management and assurance.