In general, compliance means conforming to a rule, such as a specification, policy, standard or law. Regulatory compliance describes the goal that corporations or public agencies aspire to in their efforts to ensure that personnel are aware of and take steps to comply with relevant laws and regulations.

Due to the increasing number of regulations and need for operational transparency, organizations are increasingly adopting the use of consolidated and harmonized sets of compliance controls. This approach is used to ensure that all necessary governance requirements can be met without the unnecessary duplication of effort and activity from resources.

Compliance data is defined as all data belonging or pertaining to enterprise or included in the law, which can be used for the purpose of implementing or validating compliance. It is the set of all data that is relevant to a governance officer or to a court of law for the purposes of validating consistency, completeness, or compliance.

There are two kind of Compliance requirements - Internal and External:

These are policies and guidelines that have been defined within the organization.  Usually they are determined by IT resources, Internal or External Audit groups or by Management themselves.  They allow non-regulated organizations to build a better control infrastructure based on industry best standards.

These are derived from Corporate Governance initiatives, regulations and external audit. More information on each of these and the geographic areas they represent can be found by clicking the appropriative tab on the left.