Updated: Nov 6, 2019
The white paper provides an overview of industry standards and regulatory frameworks and later also lists the benefits of each of these entities. The later section of the document lists various industry standards and regulatory frameworks providing a consolidated view for various industry verticals.
Industry Standards
Standards establish specifications and procedures designed to maximize the reliability of the products or services. Standards address a range of issues, including but not limited to various protocols to help maximize product functionality and compatibility, facilitate interoperability and support consumer safety and public health. Standards form the fundamental building blocks for product development by establishing consistent protocols that can be universally understood and adopted. Standards helps fuel compatibility and interoperability and simplifies product development, and speeds time-to-market.
Information technology standards include both hardware and software standards. Standards exist for operating systems, programming languages, communications protocols, and human computer interaction. For example, the global exchange of electronic mail messages requires standards for addressing, formatting, and transmission.
A growing array of standards allows the World Wide Web to operate, including the standards for the basic protocol, the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), the standard for the messages (HTML), and a whole series of new standards to describe more general documents (the eXtended Markup Language or XML), links (the XML Linking Language or XLL), and appearance (XML Stylesheet Language or XSL).
Benefits of Industry Standards
The benefits of using standards are:
- Market Growth for new and emerging technologies.
- Reduce development time and cost and reduce market risks
- Standards set the recognized level of quality.
- Increase productivity and enhance efficiency
- Ultimately reduce cost for consumers
- Standards ensure that products perform the functions manufactured for.
- Standards facilitate interchangeability of products and services designed for the same purpose
Regulatory Frameworks
Regulatory framework compliance describes the goal that organizations aspire to achieve in their efforts to ensure that they are aware of and take steps to comply with relevant laws, policies, 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.
Benefits of Regulatory Frameworks
At the heart of most regulations is the intention of protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information that impacts a corporation’s stakeholders. These laws can be distilled down to their essential goals:
- Establish and implement controls
- Maintain, protect, and assess compliance issues
- Identify and remediate vulnerabilities and deviations
- Provide reporting that can prove your organization’s compliance
Industry Standards & Regulatory Frameworks – Cheat Sheet
Summary
Few organizations keep compliance data i.e. all data belonging or pertaining to the enterprise or included in the law, which can be used for implementing or validating compliance in a separate store for meeting requirements. Compliance software is increasingly being implemented to help companies manage their compliance data more efficiently. Regulatory frameworks provide true, actionable guidance i.e. actual structure which becomes a backbone for organizational initiatives.
Standards make it easier to understand and compare competing products. As standards are globally adopted and applied in many markets, they also fuel international trade. It is only through the use of standards that the requirements of interconnectivity and interoperability can be assured. It is only through the application of standards that the credibility of new products and new markets can be verified.
About the Author
Sameer Paradkar is an Enterprise Architect with 15+ years of extensive experience in the ICT industry which spans across Consulting, Product Development and Systems Integration. He is an Open Group TOGAF, Oracle Master Java EA, TMForum NGOSS, IBM SOA Solutions, IBM Cloud Solutions, IBM MobileFirst, ITIL Foundation V3, COBIT 5 and AWS certified enterprise architect. He serves as an advisory architect on Enterprise Architecture programs and continues to work as a Subject Matter Expert. He has worked on multiple architecture transformation and modernization engagements in the USA, UK, Europe, Asia Pacific and Middle East Regions that presented a phased roadmap to transformation that maximized the business value, while minimizing costs and risks. Sameer is part of Architecture Group in AtoS. Prior to AtoS he has worked in organizations like EY – IT Advisory, IBM GBS, Wipro Consulting Services, TechMahindra and Infosys Technologies and specializes in IT Strategies and Enterprise transformation engagements.
Disclaimer
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and AtoS does not subscribe to the substance, veracity or truthfulness of the said opinion.
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