What does “compliance” mean?

[coffeeprogrammer]

What does “compliance” term mean? I heard Leo give an ad for a company called vanta, the only one of the acronyms he said that I have heard of before is HIPAA. I know about HIPAA because I consume medical services often, but those other acronyms I have never heard before. Compliance is like following rules that have been defined. On their webpage under the about it says “On a mission to secure the internet and protect consumer data”. Is this a product that does something in automated fashion that could be done manually? It is like the laws of something, like HIPAA laws or other laws? Do any of the SN listeners know anything about this compliance idea? I see these “compliance frameworks” on the vanta webpage and I did a search and compliance tools and the term “system hardening” came up. I have heard of that, like hardening a server. Is this compliance idea something that a pen tester would have to know about?

 

[AlanD]

"Compliance" is the process of meeting all the legal requirements applicable to your product/service. For US medical products this might be HIPPA, for any system in UK or Europe which holds personal data this would be GDPR, etc. The company presumably makes tools/frameworks which enable these requirements to be monitored and any breaches highlighted and controlled. This may be a "system solution" or a series of manual processes/checklists etc to be followed.