'Inside Security' with Nitasha Syed (Lead Product Manager, Vanta)

Last month, we attended Vantacon, and by the end of it one thing was evident – compliance has emerged as a foundational pillar of trust between businesses and their customers.

Running a software business comes with many responsibilities, and one of the most crucial is working within the boundaries of regulatory frameworks of your industry. 

Compliance isn't just a checkbox. It is the first point of trust a company builds with the external world. Not adhering to compliance standards and regulations can lead to lawsuits, hefty fines, and a damaged reputation. Ensuring your business meets the industry's requirements protects you from these risks and lets you focus on what you do best – build and ship!

When you demonstrate a commitment to ethical practices and the law, you show that you value their rights and interests. This trust can lead to stronger business relationships, increased customer loyalty, and more opportunities for collaboration.

Maintaining professionalism is another key benefit of compliance. It signals to the industry that your business is serious, responsible, and reliable. Customers and partners are more likely to work with businesses that adhere to the law and prioritize ethical practices.

We recently had the privilege of speaking with Nitasha Syed, Lead Product Manager at Vanta, a leading automated GRC platform, about the growing importance of compliance, its evolution as an industry, and the challenges of building products that foster trust while addressing regulatory requirements.

Nitasha’s been in-and-around compliance for a while now. She’s had firsthand experience while working at Rally Health during its acquisition by United Healthcare, where they navigated a labyrinth of compliance frameworks – SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, and more. 

Managing compliance retroactively with tools like Google Sheets highlighted the inefficiencies and ambiguity inherent in traditional compliance workflows. When the opportunity with Vanta arose, it was a chance to transform those pain points into actionable insights, contributing to the development of an automated compliance platform designed to address these challenges head-on.

Compliance Industry is Transitioning from Reactive to Proactive

The compliance industry is undergoing a significant transformation – from being a reactive, checkbox-driven process to becoming a proactive foundation for security and trust. This shift is vital as organizations recognize the need to continuously monitor and adapt their compliance practices to evolving threats.

Today the industry is shifting by rethinking compliance from a point-in-time mindset to a continuous compliance mindset. Instead of focusing on snapshots of your business’s security posture at audit time – or worse, only when something goes wrong – compliance is being automated to continuously monitor and improve internal compliance practices. 

This means keeping compliance top of mind year-round, proactively safeguarding your company, your employees, your customers, and their data.

This evolution is crucial in an increasingly digital world where AI is central to how people interact with products and services. As threats evolve alongside technology, businesses that prioritize transparency and continuous compliance will stand out. 

Compliance will no longer be just about meeting regulatory requirements; it will become a competitive advantage. Companies that can demonstrate trustworthiness – by safeguarding customer and partner data – will be better positioned to build and maintain strong business relationships.

Building ‘Trust’ Into Product

Compliance is ALL about trust. But building trust within a product isn’t straightforward - it requires more than just meeting regulatory standards. Bridging the gap between trust and compliance comes down to one critical factor: creating a shared language that makes sense to everyone.

Think about it: compliance often feels like a maze of rules, laws, and jargon that’s hard to navigate. But trust? Trust is intuitive. It’s knowing your data is safe and processes are in place to protect you. For example, you trust your bank because you know they’ll flag fraud, notify you, and take action to make it right. The hack doesn’t scare you as much as the reassurance that someone’s got your back.

What ties trust and compliance together is the process - how they safeguard your data, follow rules, and take action. Yet, too often, compliance gets lost in translation, especially for the people who rely on it most. The key is making compliance actionable and relatable. Instead of drowning people in legal jargon, we need to translate findings (like in a SOC 2 or ISO report) into clear steps. It’s akin to translating information and language between sales, engineers, product and designers. 

Automating Compliance While Retaining the Human Touch

Bridging trust and compliance starts with making the "why" behind compliance rules clear and actionable. When users understand how specific actions safeguard their data and their customers’ data, compliance becomes meaningful and effective.

To achieve this efficiently, compliance processes must lean more on automation - minimizing human error and ensuring consistency. But there’s a limit. While automation is key to streamlining workflows, the human touch remains essential for building trust, fostering relationships, and providing clarity when it’s needed most.

There’s a balance to strike. While software can streamline processes, it can’t replace the human touch needed to foster trust and manage relationships. It’s the ability to respond directly to a customer’s question, to have a partner reach out and ask, “Why is this working this way?”—and to answer with clarity and care. That’s something no system can replicate.

Tech builds the foundation of trust, but relationships sustain it. The best compliance solutions will combine automation with human connection to ensure clarity, accountability, and trust at every step.

Challenges of Building Tools for Compliance

The traditional challenges of compliance management are rooted in non-scalable workflows, repetitive manual processes, and a disconnect between regulatory requirements and actionable implementation. For highly regulated industries, the balance between a seamless user experience and adherence to strict compliance frameworks remains a constant struggle. How do you create a product that is intuitive and user-friendly without compromising on the complex needs of regulatory adherence?

Automated GRC companies are tackling these issues by shifting the paradigm. They translate dense legal and regulatory jargon into actionable, digestible tasks, helping businesses not only understand what needs to be done but also the why behind it. This approach empowers users to engage with compliance more confidently, turning it from an intimidating checklist into a manageable workflow.

Let's take for example Vanta: We have designed our platform to incorporate audit tools and APIs designed to streamline communication between auditors and clients. By reducing unnecessary back-and-forth, these tools minimize friction and free up time for businesses to focus on their core operations. The integration of user-centric design ensures that even in a space dominated by technical and regulation-heavy demands, businesses - whether startups or enterprises - can stay compliant without being bogged down by the process.

Shaping the Future of Compliance

By now there's little doubt that the compliance industry is complicated and constantly evolving. Automated GRC companies will have a bigger role to play in the future.

They are already redefining the compliance landscape, not just by enabling businesses to meet existing requirements but by actively influencing how compliance frameworks evolve to meet modern needs.

By leveraging vast amounts of data, these platforms provide unique insights into how businesses operate, identifying trends and inefficiencies that can inform the evolution of policies to better align with workflows.

A key responsibility is bridging the gap between policymakers and businesses, enabling proactive participation in shaping practical, scalable compliance frameworks that align with the demands of tomorrow, and we rely heavily on our international networks of partners, auditors, and subject matter experts to stay ahead of emerging regulations. For instance, as global data privacy and AI regulations continue to evolve, these platforms are uniquely positioned to help businesses navigate new frameworks seamlessly, ensuring compliance without disruption.

Final Thoughts: Building Trust Beyond Compliance

Nitasha highlights that every automated GRC company's mission should extend beyond compliance. They are all in the business of enabling trust, not just between them and their customers, but between their customers and their stakeholders. Whether through automated trust pages, streamlined audit experiences, intuitive dashboard for management or creating knowledge bases.

Trust is built over time and through consistency, and designing a product to translate that is a beautiful challenge.

As businesses face increasing scrutiny and customers demand transparency, platforms like Vanta will continue to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of compliance, security, and trust. This conversation was a reminder that compliance isn’t just a hurdle to clear, it’s a powerful enabler of trust and a competitive advantage in today’s software/digital world.

We'd like to thank Nitasha for her insights and participation in this series. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.