A Compliance Officer (CO) is an individual that needs to have a strong understanding of his/her organization's processes, documentation practices, risk management practices, incident response plan and current compliance requirements. Read below for additional details or download the detailed job description.

Information acquisition, utilization, and disposition are processes that must be efficient and effective to enable the business to accomplish its mission.

• The CO must understand how these processes work in order to ensure their correct functioning.
• Knowing these processes will also help the CO realize potential points of exposure, compromise, or misuse; so they can be addressed and corrected as quickly as possible before exposures occur (if possible).
• Exposures include the unintentional "mistake" and the intentional "attack" for internal or external sources.

The CO needs to understand documentation because he/she will have to produce it during normal performance of their tasks:

• Documentation is also used for internal or external investigative efforts.
• These tasks include classification and categorization of information, chain of custody, records retention practices, declassification and disposal practices, system audits, and other such activities.

A CO needs to understand the basics of risk management and remediation:

• This is so they know what constitutes "risk" (of compromise, etc.), asset valuation, methods of mitigation, and so forth.

They need to understand how to respond to incidents of compromise:

• Compromises can, do, and will occur no matter how good our programs are.
• When they do, the CO needs to know the "five R's" - Recognize, React, Remediate, Restore, and Resume.

The CO most certainly needs to understand requirements and what it means to be "compliant" in each case.

This is more than simply knowing them, the CO must know how to achieve them in a balanced way that allows them to establish a compliant position (either in the "letter" or the "spirit" of the law as the case may be), while enabling the entity to function efficiently and effectively.

This means the CO must understand about control types:

• Administrative: Paper-based directives which include Policy, Standard, Procedure, and Guideline.
• Technical: Components of hardware, software, firmware and their configurations.
• Physical: Locks, monitoring, facility management and similar aspects.
• Organizational: Contracts, BA addendum, and audit tools for BA (SAS 70, ISO 27002).

The CO must also understand the individual categories (each of these exists in each of the above types):

• Preventive/Deterrent
• Detective
• Corrective/Recovery
• Compensating

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