The Compliance Complexity Problem  

As the regulatory burden on businesses grows, so does the need for multi-framework compliance.  

Faced with requirements that vary by regulation and geography, organisations risk duplicating work and placing unsustainably high levels of demand on both teams and resources. This scattered approach can lead to compliance team burnout, operational inefficiencies, and increased costs. But compliance should support your business growth – not slow it down. 

In this playbook, you’ll learn top tips for consolidating your compliance to align with key standards, break down silos and meet your strategic goals. Discover your step-by-step guide to building strong compliance foundations and scaling them across multiple frameworks and requirements.  

The Strategic Case for Consolidation  

Approaching multiple standards and regulations on an individual basis is achievable, but inefficient.  

For example, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Network and Information Security (NIS 2) Directive, and information security standard ISO 27001 are all relevant to businesses operating in the EU. In-scope businesses face navigating multiple sets of requirements, with a high level of commonalities but fundamental differences.  

Nearly two thirds (65%) of respondents to our State of Information Security Report 2024  agreed that the pace of regulatory change is making it harder to comply with information security best practices. A third (33%) say compliance with regulations and industry standards is a challenge they currently face. Additionally, nearly a third (32%) of respondents to our State of Information Security Report 2025 said that they faced information security and compliance team burnout due to increasing workload. 

Building a scalable, adaptable approach to compliance is vital to effectively support compliance professionals. It also enables businesses to proactively prepare for – and more easily respond to – evolving regulatory requirements. Consolidating compliance saves time, ensures consistency and supports both operational and strategic compliance goals. 

Time savings: Address related requirements across multiple frameworks with a single unifying policy or control, streamlining your compliance team’s workload and eliminating redundancies. 

Reduced risk: Assess and meet your compliance obligations across multiple regulatory requirements with a consolidated risk register, identifying and treating risks more effectively. 

Consistent evidence handling: Improve evidence management processes, reduce redundancy, and streamline audit processes. 

Enhanced visibility: View the real-time status of your compliance across multiple frameworks and easily identify action areas. 

Reduced costs: Streamline your compliance processes, reduce time spent on compliance tasks, and improve risk management to unlock cost savings. 

Peace of mind: Unifying compliance management assures board and leadership teams that all your compliance obligations are being met efficiently and effectively. 

Streamlined market entry: Access new markets faster by pre-addressing compliance requirements in required frameworks. 

Build stakeholder trust: Demonstrable compliance maturity supports your business in building trust among a range of stakeholders. 

How to Build Once and Comply Everywhere 

Coalfire’s Compliance Report 2023 found that almost 70% of service organisations need to demonstrate compliance or conformity to at least six frameworks spanning information security and data privacy taxonomies, underscoring the need for a strategic, unified approach to compliance management.  

A unified approach includes: 

Mapping controls across frameworks: Mapping requirements across multiple frameworks enables you to identify areas where controls overlap and your compliance can be streamlined. This also enables you to identify and address potential gaps. 

Let’s say you’re preparing for NIS 2, but your organisation is already ISO 27001 certified. Instead of starting from scratch, you can adapt your existing ISO controls to meet NIS 2’s expectations on supply chain security – saving weeks of effort and dramatically speeding up time to readiness. 

Using pre-built templates: Get a head-start on your multi-framework compliance, accelerate setup, and align evidence using specialist pre-built controls and templates. These templates are aligned with specific standard and regulatory requirements and designed to streamline the compliance process while reducing manual workload for your compliance team. Crucially, you can also update and amend pre-built templates to fit your organisation’s specific requirements and objectives. 

Proactively monitoring compliance: Use automated alerts and regulatory tracking tools to stay informed about compliance requirements and regulatory changes. You can also use automated monitoring tools to proactively assess your organisation’s compliance and flag potential issues in real-time. 

Adapting to Your Unique Risk Landscape 

Customising Pre-Built Templates 

Pre-built templates are a quick win, but not a set-and-forget exercise. It’s vital to consider the templates in the context of: 

  • Your industry 
  • Your business needs and objectives 
  • The regulatory landscape impacting your organisation 
  • Existing internal processes. 

Taking this additional context into consideration will enable you to customise pre-built templates and build on them so they align with multiple relevant frameworks as well as your organisational goals. Regularly reviewing these policies and controls will also ensure that they remain up-to-date and relevant. 

Leveraging Compliance Automation 

Strategically combining automation and human decision-making can support your multi-framework compliance efforts, reducing manual workload. Automation plays a key role in streamlining time-consuming admin tasks such as evidence collection, control monitoring, task reminders, incident flagging, audit trails and report generation, freeing up your team to focus on strategy, risk mitigation and delivering on business objectives.  

However, for tasks such as risk assessments, incident response, decision-making and compliance strategy, human oversight remains vital. Using automation to support decision-making rather than replace it will empower your compliance team when creating a resilient, adaptable compliance strategy that can be scaled across frameworks. 

Strategic Risk Management 

Taking a risk-based approach is vital to successful compliance with frameworks like ISO 27001 and NIS 2. By centralising your risk tracking with a unified approach to multi-framework compliance, you can unlock a comprehensive view of your organisational risk and risk management across frameworks. This high level of oversight ensures that you can respond strategically to new and evolving risks, align with regulatory requirements and evidence decision-making for audits. 

In addition, the strategic risk management approach enables you to clearly report compliance and security statuses at board level and can even support bids for increased security or information security budget, backed up with live risk information across multiple frameworks.  

Turning Strategy into Action: How IO Supports Unified Compliance 

Using the IO platform as a single source of truth, you can centralise your compliance management, remove duplication, and seamlessly manage your multi-framework compliance strategy.  

Control mapping: Link your evidence, policies and controls across frameworks, automatically generate audit trails, and instantly generate reports to demonstrate your compliance status. 

Pre-built templates: IO provides pre-built policy and control templates, which you can adopt, adapt, or add to so they align with your business’s unique needs and risks while maintaining an audit-ready structure. 

Automate compliance tasks: Your automated reminders trigger when risks, policies and controls are due to be reviewed, so nothing slips through the cracks. 

Efficiently manage risk: Centralise risk management to seamlessly address risk across multiple frameworks in one location. 

Achieve efficient, centralised compliance, without burning out your team or adding risk. 

Unlock Centralised, Scalable Compliance 

An effective multi-framework compliance strategy will enable you to build your compliance base once, then scale across frameworks with confidence. Whether your business needs to align with two frameworks or ten, mapping the overlap between requirements, identifying areas to automate and using the right tools to consolidate your work can streamline your compliance management.  

From Scattered to Streamlined: Your Five Step Roadmap to Unified Compliance Success 

Step 1: Identify Your Compliance Obligations

The compliance landscape is continually evolving. Your compliance obligations will change as your business grows and develops, you enter new markets, or you submit tenders for work with prospects in highly regulated industries. Identifying the regulations that apply to your organisation and your specific compliance obligations will give you vital insight into the frameworks you need to implement.  

Example compliance obligations include: 

  • The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) if your organisation is a financial entity or a third-party ICT provider to financial entities 
  • The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) if your organisation stores, processes or transmits credit or debit cardholder data 
  • The Trusted Information Security Assessment Exchange (TISAX) if your business supplies or provides services to automotive manufacturers. 

Step 2: Map Your Frameworks and Highlight Overlapping Controls

Next, map the requirements of the frameworks you’ve already implemented and those you plan to implement or comply with. By mapping the common requirements addressed by similar controls across different frameworks, you can avoid duplication and streamline your compliance management. 

For example, you may currently comply with ISO 27001 and plan to comply with DORA and NIS 2 as part of your organisation’s growth plans. There are overlapping supply chain management requirements outlined in: 

  • DORA chapter V 
  • NIS 2 article 21  
  • ISO 27001 A.5.19, A.5.20 and A.5.21  

Rather than implementing policies and controls for each framework, you can address the above requirements by reviewing your existing ISO 27001 policies and controls. Using your mapping documentation, you can identify any updates needed to ensure alignment with the requirements of NIS 2 and DORA.  

Step 3: Trial Automated Evidence Collection in One Area

Automated evidence collection can reduce manual workload, improve accuracy and support centralised compliance management. To trial automating your evidence collection, we suggest choosing a specific focus area, such as staff information security training and awareness – a requirement for ISO 27001 compliance.  

An effective automated solution will integrate with your organisation’s third-party software. You can set your chosen solution up to automatically gather evidence of compliance activities taking place using that software, for example training sessions assigned to each staff member and their completion status. The solution will log this evidence, enabling you to demonstrate how your business meets compliance requirements. 

Step 4: Review Tool Options to Consolidate Risk Registers

Multi-framework compliance often requires a more cohesive solution than manually updated spreadsheets, emails and documents can offer. Relying on these methods can make tasks such as risk register consolidation intensive and time-consuming for compliance teams.  

However, using a centralised compliance platform will allow you to create a risk and assign it to multiple frameworks in just a few clicks, rather than maintaining and updating disconnected risk registers. 

A centralised compliance platform will also support your compliance team in completing the following tasks across multiple frameworks: 

  • Automated task management and reviews 
  • Risk management 
  • Evidence collection 
  • Policy and procedure creation 
  • Control implementation 
  • Incident response planning 
  • Employee awareness and training 
  • Audit trail generation. 

We suggest identifying and shortlisting potential compliance platforms using trusted business software and service review platforms such as G2. 

Step 5: Book a Demo or Discovery Session

Once you’ve created your shortlist, reach out to your potential compliance platforms to book demos or discovery sessions and learn how each platform aligns with your compliance requirements.  

If you’re looking to unlock multi-framework compliance confidence with IO, we’re ready to help – simply book your demo to see the platform in action. 

Future-Proof Your Compliance 

New regulations are already just around the corner: the EU AI Act is now coming into effect in stages, while the UK is developing the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill and the Data Use and Access Bill. Regulators aren’t going to wait for your business to be prepared, but with a multi-framework compliance approach, you can prepare in advance. 

As global regulations continue to evolve, implementing a scalable approach to compliance will soon become a competitive differentiator, allowing your organisation the agility to adopt and comply with new regulations and frameworks. A unified system isn’t just a present-day fix; it’s a future safeguard.