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Cybersecurity vocabulary · Governance, Risk and Compliance

Compliance

Meaning in cybersecurity, with examples

/kəmˈplaɪəns/nounCore term

In cybersecurity, compliance means: The state of following the laws, regulations, standards and internal policies that apply to an organisation, and being able to prove it.

In Turkish: uyum, mevzuata uyum, uyumluluk

How it is used

Used for both the goal and the team: 'the compliance team', 'a compliance requirement'. Organisations are 'compliant with' or 'in compliance with' standards such as ISO/IEC 27001 or PCI DSS. Security people often point out that compliance is not the same as security.

Example sentences

  1. We need to show compliance with PCI DSS before the payment launch.

  2. Is the new logging setup compliant with our retention policy?

Common collocations

  • regulatory compliance
  • compliance requirement
  • compliant with
  • compliance audit
  • maintain compliance
  • auditA formal, independent review that checks whether an organisation's security controls and processes meet a standard, a law or its own policies.
  • GDPRGeneral Data Protection Regulation: the European Union law, applied since May 2018, that sets rules for how organisations collect, use and protect personal data.
  • security policyA formal document, approved by management, that sets the rules an organisation follows to protect its information, systems and people.
  • security controlAny safeguard, whether technical, administrative or physical, that reduces a security risk, such as a firewall, a policy, a training course or a locked door.
  • riskThe chance that a threat will use a weakness and cause harm, combined with how serious that harm would be for the organisation.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Governance, Risk and Compliance

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