Understanding the human role in compliance

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In cybersecurity, there’s a well-known, and somewhat unfortunate saying, “humans are the weakest link.” It’s a phrase that tends to surface after a breach or incident is tracked back to a misconfigured setting, a missed update, or someone simply clicking on the wrong link. But when it comes to compliance, the role of human error is much more nuanced, and more systemic.

Businesses often won’t fail audits because they’re ignoring best practices. They fail because people make mistakes, forget things, work with incomplete information, or don’t fully understand what’s being asked of them. Compliance is full of good intentions, but easily undermined by day-to-day mistakes.

So what does human error actually look like in the compliance process, and what businesses can do to limit its impact.

Understanding the Human Role in Compliance

At its heart, compliance depends on people. People interpret frameworks, apply controls and settings, manage evidence, and oversee changes. While this works in smaller settings, it quickly becomes brittle as businesses grow, or as multiple standards are layered together. Human processes, like manually updating policies or tracking changes, are not only slow, but are also incredibly vulnerable.

Common sources of human error include:

Misunderstanding requirements: Compliance language is often left open to interpretation. Without significant experience, teams may assume they’ve met requirements, when in reality they’ve applied the wrong settings.

Inconsistent implementations: Security controls may be rolled out on some systems but not others. A new device could be overlooked and is unmanaged, or out-of-date software is not properly removed. These mistakes are common when teams are working from static documents, memory, or out-of-date spreadsheets.

Missed actions: Regular tasks like account reviews, policy updates, or risk assessments can be forgotten in busy periods, especially when there’s no clear individual taking responsibility.

Breakdowns in communication: Compliance often involves multiple departments, often leading to tasks falling between the cracks and being forgotten in a whirlwind of admin.

Even when people care deeply about getting compliance right, they’re often limited by their own capacity and other responsibilities. Mistakes aren’t usually a sign of carelessness, but rather an indication that the compliance process is too manual.

Human Error Isn’t Just an End-User Problem

It’s tempting, and often easy, to think that human error is something that only happens at the user level. An employee clicks a phishing link, or reuses a weak password. And while these are certainly risks, the more consequential errors often come from those who are supposed to protect the users.

Errors such as:

An administrator forgetting to enforce multi-factor authentication on a new piece of software

A developer who pushes code without checking it with company policy

A manager who assumes a third-party supplier meets their security requirements, without verification.

While these errors aren’t done out of malice, or even negligence, they create real vulnerabilities that are often hard to detect without additional investment in manual oversight, or through an automation tool. They also show how compliance often fails because a mistake is allowed to continue undetected and unresolved.

The Cost of Human-Driven Compliance

Relying on humans to manage compliance also comes with significant and financial costs. Hours are spent chasing information, filling in documentation, digging through files to find information, and dropping everything to prepare for audits.

More importantly, human-driven compliance is nigh impossible to manage at scale. What works for a 10-person team quickly becomes unmanageable with 50. What worked for Cyber Essentials doesn’t translate when trying to achieve ISO 27001 or SOC 2. Human-led compliance works, until it doesn’t. Something is missed, a document isn’t updated, or a control isn’t properly enforced.

‘Compliance fatigue’ is also a common issue for even the best teams, where processes have become to complex to handle, or evidence is too fragmented to properly document.

This is where an automated solution like OneClickComply can help businesses streamline their processes.

How OneClickComply Reduces Human Error Through Automation

OneClickComply was built to address problems such as this. Rather than relying on people to manually track, implement, and monitor security controls, the platform automates the entire process from start to finish.

OneClickComply automatically detects and remediates gaps in your compliance across platform such as Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, AWS and Azure, for a wide range of cybersecurity standards. Instead of telling an employee to enable a certain control, or ensure settings are properly configured, the OneClickComply platform scans your environment, produces a to-do list of issues, and allows you to implement the fix in a single click.

With continuous monitoring features, automated policy generation, and comprehensive ISMS features, the platform provides a clear view of your compliance across your entire organisation. The automated fixes also significantly cut down manual effort, reducing the likelihood of human error compromising your compliance efforts.

Final Thoughts

It’s a fact that humans will always make mistakes. But in compliance, the cost of those mistakes can be incredibly high, often the deciding factor between passing and failing audits. The solution to this isn’t to expect perfection, it’s to design compliance processes that don’t collapse when someone forgets to tick a box.