2 minutes read How much does ISO 27001 cost? Are your organization’s SOC 2 costs allocated? How can you maintain a balanced budget, while maintaining IT compliance?
Security audits can be complex, confusing, and time-consuming. They can also cost an organization a pretty penny. As such, when seeking to sail through IT compliance and security audits, it’s important to identify the difference between how much you’re spending, and how much you SHOULD be spending, to get the security audit results your organization and clients seek and deserve.
To better understand the compliance pricing landscape, let’s overview the direct, indirect, and opportunity loss costs associated with SOC 2 and ISO 27001 audits.
Direct costs
How much are you spending on consultancy services, auditor fees, and security or IT tools needed to comply with the standard requirements (such as a code vulnerability scanner, for example)?
Numbers for direct costs vary widely, depending on the nature of the organization, the product architecture (SaaS or not), the rating of the auditor (The ‘Big 4’ or others), and the geography.
Indirect costs
These are the sum of all organization resources spent on preparing and running a security compliance process. For example, all the efforts put in by internal teams to define the audit’s scope, collect evidence, analyze and identify the gaps, remediate them, and manage the overall process.
For fast-growing organizations, this can quickly sum up to hundreds of work hours spent by your most expensive and time-limited employees!
Opportunity loss costs
A lack of adequate security compliance can lead to failed business opportunities and subsequent financial loss. In today’s market, given the high sensitivity to data protection and privacy, a SOC 2 report or ISO 27001 certification must be made available, to prevent or mitigate opportunity loss costs.
Bottom line: how much does an internal audit cost?
All in all, the overall cost of a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 audit run manually without any automation can be extremely painful. It can significantly and negatively influence any team’s availability and ability to focus on its business-critical tasks. This is without considering a vital component of audit costs, when it comes to regulated markets: fines applied by the authorities, should any misalignment with regulatory requirements be detected.
Automating security compliance processes has quickly become the leading option for forward-looking compliance managers and security experts. By significantly reducing the overall efforts required in these processes, you can save hundreds of hours every year and experience a major drop in your total cost of ownership.
In the market for a compliance automation solution to reduce your security compliance costs?
Discover Cypago’s end-to-end intelligent compliance solution for any security standard and start orchestrating your startup’s security compliance, today!