Cost and Considerations of Compliance

As a business, if your customers are required by law to meet a certain regulatory standard, then it follows that to stand better chances of retaining existing customers and also attract new clients,  a serious organisation will obtain the same regulatory compliance standards or come close even if it does not apply to your industry.

So for instance, if you are a data storage or backup organisation and one of your clients happens to be a credit card payment merchant that is required to meet PCI DSS, you should at least meet most of the criteria in the PCI Data Security Standard that are relevant and may apply to the way you handle and store their data.

This way, you can be sure that clients will be happy since they can relate to the way you do business being similar to theirs, and that you are voluntarily subjected to high standards that they are required to meet.

It is worthwhile to note that meeting most of these regulations can really be expensive, so in trying to please clients-and be compliant, always remember to do a cost-benefit analysis before you approach the bean counters, otherwise in the end you might not make the bottom line.