What is regulatory compliance?

Regulatory compliance is the process of meeting the laws, rules, standards, and requirements set by regulators, governments, and supervisory bodies. It helps organizations understand which external obligations apply, assign ownership, operate controls, collect evidence, and report when required.

In governance, risk, and compliance (GRC), regulatory compliance matters because regulatory expectations rarely stay still. Organizations need a clear way to track obligations, map them to controls, monitor change, manage issues, and prove compliance across teams, regions, and frameworks.

The US Department of Justice’s Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs asks whether a compliance program is well-designed, applied in good faith, and works in practice. Those questions are useful for regulatory compliance too. It is not enough to say a regulation has been reviewed. Organizations need evidence that the requirement is understood, owned, controlled, and monitored.

ORIGINS

Why has regulatory compliance become harder?

Regulatory compliance has become harder because organizations are dealing with more obligations, more jurisdictions, more frameworks, more evidence requests, and faster regulatory change.

A global business may need to manage obligations across data privacy, cyber security, financial crime, operational resilience, anti-bribery, health and safety, ESG reporting, consumer protection, employment law, AI governance, sector rules, and internal controls. Many of these requirements overlap, but they are often managed separately.

The scale of complexity is clear. PwC’s Global Compliance Survey 2025 found that 85% of respondents said compliance requirements had become more complex over the previous 3 years.

Gartner’s 2025 emerging risk survey also found that an unsettled regulatory and legal environment ranked as the top emerging risk in Q1 2025 among 266 senior enterprise risk executives. Gartner linked this to increasing compliance complexity and costs caused by regulatory authority changes.

This is the problem regulatory compliance teams are facing. The challenge is not only knowing the rules. It is translating them into controls, ownership, evidence, reporting, and remediation.

PROCESS

Why does regulatory compliance matter?

Regulatory compliance matters because failure can expose an organization to enforcement action, fines, restrictions, remediation orders, litigation, operational disruption, reputational harm, and loss of stakeholder confidence.

Strong regulatory compliance helps organizations:

• identify applicable laws, rules, standards, and regulatory expectations
• map obligations to policies, controls, processes, and owners
• track regulatory change
• manage compliance assessments
• collect evidence
• identify gaps and control weaknesses
• track breaches, issues, exceptions, and remediation
• report to regulators, leadership, committees, and boards
• support audit and assurance activity
• reduce duplicated work across frameworks

The value is not just defensive. PwC’s Global Compliance Survey 2025 found that technology investment helped respondents achieve faster identification and response to compliance issues for 53%, higher-quality or more insightful reporting for 48%, faster or more confident decision-making for 46%, and increased productivity, efficiencies, and cost savings for 43%.

That matters because regulatory compliance often fails when teams cannot connect the requirement to the action. A regulation may sit in a tracker, but unless it links to a control, owner, deadline, evidence record, and reporting process, the organization may still struggle to prove compliance.

What does regulatory compliance look like in practice?

In practice, regulatory compliance usually involves:

• identifying applicable regulatory requirements
• maintaining a regulatory obligations register
• mapping obligations to policies, controls, processes, systems, and owners
• assessing compliance risks
• monitoring regulatory change
• reviewing new and amended rules
• assigning actions to responsible owners
• collecting evidence of compliance
• managing control testing and assurance
• tracking issues, breaches, exceptions, and remediation
• reporting to leadership, committees, boards, auditors, and regulators
• reviewing whether the compliance process remains effective

Regulatory compliance should be risk-based. A critical obligation that affects customer harm, financial reporting, data privacy, safety, or operational resilience should not receive the same level of oversight as a low-impact internal requirement.

How do SCF compliance frameworks support regulatory compliance?

SCF compliance frameworks can help organizations manage regulatory overlap by giving teams a common control structure.

The Secure Controls Framework describes itself as a free cybersecurity and data privacy metaframework, with 1,400+ controls mapped to 200+ laws, regulations, and frameworks. The SCF start-here guide says the framework includes controls across 33 domains and mappings to 200+ laws, regulations, and frameworks.

That matters because many cybersecurity, privacy, and resilience requirements ask for similar evidence in different ways. Without a common control framework, teams can end up assessing the same control repeatedly for ISO 27001, NIST, SOC 2, DORA, PCI DSS, NIS2, and other requirements.

SCF helps by creating a common control architecture. The value is not just that a framework exists. The value is that teams can map 1 control to multiple obligations, reuse evidence, identify gaps, and reduce duplicate assessment work.

CoreStream GRC’s SCF x SANNOS x CoreStream GRC solution builds on that approach. It enables organizations to assess controls once and automatically map them across 200+ regulations and frameworks, including ISO 27001, NIST, DORA, and PCI DSS.

That is where SCF compliance frameworks become practical. They help move regulatory compliance from repeated evidence collection to connected control coverage.

PEOPLE

Who is responsible for regulatory compliance?

Regulatory compliance usually sits across several teams. The compliance team may coordinate the process, but ownership depends on the obligation and business activity.

Common stakeholders include:

1. The board

The board oversees material regulatory compliance risks and expects clear reporting on exposure, breaches, remediation, and control effectiveness.

2. Senior leadership

Senior leaders are responsible for making sure regulatory compliance is properly resourced, embedded, and aligned with the organization’s strategy and risk appetite.

3. Compliance teams

Compliance teams identify obligations, monitor regulatory change, advise the business, coordinate assessments, and report on compliance status.

4. Legal teams

Legal teams interpret regulatory requirements, enforcement risks, contractual obligations, and legal consequences.

5. Risk teams

Risk teams connect regulatory compliance to risk appetite, enterprise risk management, controls, and board reporting.

6. Control owners

Control owners operate the controls that support regulatory compliance and provide evidence that controls are working.

7. Business owners

Business owners apply regulatory requirements in day-to-day operations and are often responsible for completing actions or remediation.

8. IT, cyber, privacy, and data teams

These teams play a major role where regulatory compliance relates to data protection, cyber security, technology resilience, AI governance, records, access, or system controls.

9. Internal audit and assurance teams

Internal audit and assurance teams test whether regulatory compliance controls and processes are designed and operating effectively.

Regulatory compliance is strongest when teams know exactly which obligations they own and what evidence they need to provide.

TECHNOLOGY

What do good regulatory compliance tools look like?

Good regulatory compliance tools should help organizations connect obligations, controls, owners, evidence, issues, and reporting in 1 place.

Manual trackers can work for small sets of obligations, but they break down when requirements multiply across jurisdictions, frameworks, regulators, and business units. The risk is that teams spend more time chasing evidence than managing compliance.

Strong regulatory compliance tools should support:

• regulatory obligations registers
• regulatory change tracking
• framework mapping
• common control frameworks
• SCF compliance framework mapping where relevant
• policy and control mapping
• evidence collection and reuse
• control testing
• issue, breach, and exception management
• remediation tracking
• approvals and escalations
• audit trails
• dashboards and reporting
• ownership by obligation, control, region, entity, or business unit
• links between regulations, risks, controls, audits, policies, and incidents

The goal is to make regulatory compliance easier to operate and easier to prove.

How CoreStream GRC helps with regulatory compliance

The CoreStream GRC point of view is simple: regulatory compliance should be mapped, owned, evidenced, and reportable.

Too often, regulatory compliance teams manage obligations in 1 place, controls in another, evidence in shared folders, and remediation actions in email. That creates duplication and makes reporting harder than it needs to be.

CoreStream GRC Compliance Management software helps organizations manage obligations, remediation plans, actions, owners, assurance, and reporting through connected workflows.

The platform can help teams connect:

• regulatory obligations
• compliance frameworks
• SCF controls and mappings
• policies and standards
• controls and control owners
• assessments and evidence
• issues, breaches, and exceptions
• remediation plans
• approvals and escalations
• dashboards and reports
• audit trails

The SCF x SANNOS x CoreStream GRC solution adds an important layer for organizations managing overlapping cybersecurity and privacy frameworks. By combining SCF’s common control structure with SANNOS AI and CoreStream GRC workflows, teams can reduce repeated assessment work, map evidence across requirements, and keep compliance activity connected to day-to-day controls.

This does not replace expert judgment. It makes expert judgment easier to apply by reducing manual evidence matching and showing where gaps remain.

The aim is clear: less duplication, stronger evidence, and faster reporting.

As CoreStream GRC puts it in its SCF guidance:

“SCF helps by creating a common control architecture.”

CoreStream GRC

Common challenges with regulatory compliance

Organizations often struggle with regulatory compliance when:

• obligations are spread across different systems and teams
• regulatory change is not linked to controls and owners
• overlapping frameworks create duplicated evidence requests
• controls are mapped inconsistently
• evidence is collected manually
• policies are not updated when requirements change
• remediation actions are not tracked to completion
• compliance reporting is too manual
• audit trails are difficult to reconstruct
• business teams do not understand what they own
• framework mapping depends on specialist knowledge held by a few people
• compliance work becomes reactive rather than planned

The practical test is simple: can the organization show which regulatory requirements apply, which controls support them, who owns those controls, what evidence exists, and what gaps remain?

Regulatory compliance best practices

Strong regulatory compliance usually depends on:

• a clear obligations register
• regulatory change monitoring
• obligations mapped to controls and policies
• clear ownership
• risk-based prioritization
• common control frameworks where requirements overlap
• evidence reuse
• issue and breach workflows
• remediation tracking
• reliable audit trails
• reporting that shows compliance status and action
• regular review of control effectiveness

The OECD Good Practice Guidance on Internal Controls, Ethics, and Compliance says the guidance is addressed to companies for establishing and ensuring the effectiveness of internal controls, ethics, and compliance programs for preventing and detecting bribery of foreign public officials. The underlying lesson applies more broadly: controls and compliance programs should be effective, not just documented.

For cyber and privacy compliance, SCF can help by reducing framework sprawl. Instead of treating every regulation as a separate project, organizations can map shared controls, reuse evidence, and manage exceptions more clearly.

The best regulatory compliance approach is practical, traceable, and repeatable. It should help teams prove compliance without rebuilding the same answer every time a regulator, auditor, customer, or board member asks.

Recommended reads

• PwC: Global Compliance Survey 2025
• Gartner: Unsettled regulatory and legal environment tops emerging risks
• DOJ: Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs
• Secure Controls Framework
• SCF: What is the SCF?
• CoreStream GRC: Compliance Management software
• CoreStream GRC: SCF x SANNOS x CoreStream GRC
• CoreStream GRC: Secure Controls Framework, SANNOS and CoreStream GRC

FAQs on regulatory compliance