Question

A multinational manufacturer must simultaneously demonstrate compliance with ISO 27001, PCI DSS, and a new regional privacy law. The CISO notices the compliance team is running three separate audits, duplicating evidence collection, and producing conflicting control statements that confuse the board. The CISO wants to reduce audit fatigue and cost while maintaining assurance across all three regimes. Which approach best addresses this problem?

Accepted Answer

Establish a unified control framework (control crosswalk) that maps overlapping requirements across all three regimes to a single set of enterprise controls, then collect evidence once and satisfy multiple mandates

Answer

Adopt only ISO 27001 as the authoritative framework and assume its certification will automatically satisfy PCI DSS and the regional privacy law

Answer

Continue running separate audits but stagger them across the fiscal year so the teams are never working on more than one at a time

Answer

Outsource all three audits to a single external assessor and let them decide which controls apply to each regime