What conditions allow for innovation?
To the layman, the secret recipe might include creativity, freedom, investment – the kinds of things that give experts a free hand to explore, implement and advance. Chances are, regulation isn’t on the list, but as IT specialists working in regulated industries, we know that compliance is a fact of life. Indeed, checks and balances are critical to evidencing benefits like security, resilience, recoverability and the broader scalability of products and services.
Yet, despite regulation being as much a key part of the operating environment as bandwidth, latency or availability, many organisations fail to manage it correctly. Innovation in regulated industries isn’t blocked by regulation itself, but by weak foundations that don’t enable innovation.
If your cloud, connectivity, comms and security aren’t secure by design and don’t produce continuous assurance, compliance becomes friction (then takes the blame when things go wrong). The result is operational outcomes are lost and issues like higher costs, increased cyber risks and reduced agility – all things that drag innovation to a standstill.
So, what does strong, compliant infrastructure look like? What steps can your organisation take to improve its approach?
Read on to find out how you can turn your industry’s IT regulations into an engine for innovation. Learn about our managed network and cyber security services, or contact our experts to find out how we can help.
Incorporate regulation from day one
For something so critical, regulation can be consigned to an afterthought. It’s often seen as something that’s tacked onto a service after decisions are made, rather than influencing them from the outset.
As a result, projects encounter issues later down the line due to friction between compliance and reality and the need to devise and implement reworks. This is amplified further if you work in an industry that experiences regular regulatory change, or if your organisation operates or wishes to expand across a range of jurisdictions, each with their own regimes. Regardless of the scenario, the delays are time-consuming and costly.
It doesn’t need to be this way. Compliance works best when it’s built into your infrastructure from the start, just like performance, security or identity management. When those requirements are designed into your platforms across areas like access and governance, compliance becomes part of how things run – not something that slows everything down later.
Stop the scramble for evidence
Compliance rarely exists without evidence. But if your systems don’t allow you to easily or automatically collect that data, every audit becomes a scramble.
Suddenly, it’s all hands on deck to find the data that’s essential to proving that operations are up to scratch. Instead of spending their time modernising, optimising and innovating, your team needs to dust off their magnifying glasses then spend time sifting through siloed data stores, manually collating screenshots, spreadsheets and email chains.
Even if your organisation manages to avoid this worst-case scenario, your audit trails could likely be better optimised. Regulated organisations need an operational foundation that matches the ongoing need for confidentiality, integrity, availability and resilience. One that lets you easily test and evaluate, and where capabilities can be restored quickly if something goes wrong.
Continuous proof by design protects your data, enables clear access and lets you understand risk and improve security without slowing down your teams. It becomes an integral part of how your organisation runs.
In practice, evidence-generating infrastructure means implementing constant background monitoring and logging of system activity. Using this wellspring of reliable data, you can then automate compliance reports and generate strategic insights so rapid decision-making isn’t reliant on slow administration.
Make resilience about service outcomes, not percentages
IT teams are used to measuring through metrics like uptime and availability. Those numbers matter – if systems aren’t available, services can’t run. But in regulated industries, resilience needs to be measured by more than percentages. Organisations also need to show that critical services can keep operating during disruption, recover quickly when something goes wrong, and importantly, continue to meet security and compliance requirements.
That’s because regulators and stakeholders care about whether services can resist things like cyber attacks, platform outages, and supplier failures. IT needs to be able to demonstrate governance, protect data, reduce risk and rapidly adapt to new regulations – all things which go way beyond a simple percentage.
Thinking of IT this way can seem like it might pile on the complexity and difficulty, but embedding resilience into your network architecture and IT operations doesn’t automatically mean overtime for your technical team.
Resilience comes from having the right visibility, controls and processes in place across your environment. That might include network security monitoring to help identify and respond to issues quickly, penetration testing to uncover vulnerabilities before they can be exploited, and wider measures such as incident response planning, backup and recovery testing, access controls, supplier risk management and regular assurance checks. Together, these capabilities help organisations understand risk, act quickly and keep critical services running when disruption happens.
The result is a secure system that supports innovation – even through tricky periods.
Choose an IT partner that understands compliance
Once upon a time, regulating IT infrastructure involved periodic inspections. This was a slow, costly process that put pressure on staff. Today, that doesn’t have to be the case. Continuous assurance is possible. You can build secure, resilient and audit-ready foundations and maintain them effectively through change, audit and incident – you just need a partner that can make it happen.
If your organisation’s specific regulatory requirements are engineered into the foundations of your IT systems and maintained to adapt to change, you’ll create more room for innovation.
You’ll never need to develop capabilities from scratch and try to plug them into your existing setup. And any operational burdens and productivity losses caused by compliance will be reduced too, thanks to the platform being designed, operated, and improved with governance as standard.
Redcentric has long partnered with regulated industries. Our core network is engineered to meet the needs of highly regulated environments including the Health and Social Care Network (HSCN) – the standard data network for the NHS and care services in England. Thanks to those controls and operating standards being built into the core of our systems, every customer benefits from that higher baseline, even if you’re not in a regulated sector yourself. Find out how this worked in practice for East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust.
We don’t bolt on security and governance at a later date when the chips are down or our customers specifically ask for it. Our services are secure by design, they’re part of how we design our networks and run day to day, so you can rely on consistent operations and assurance.
Don’t let compliance take the blame for poor innovation. Talk to our team and take the first step towards building a network that flexes with regulation and supports a better future for your organisation.
