In today’s world, this is the question each business is asking itself: How do you demonstrate that you can be trusted with customer data? Payment processors require PCI certification. Enterprise buyers request a SOC 2 report. It is expected that privacy regulators will see a genuine ISO/IEC 27701:2025 program. Healthcare businesses must have HIPAA compliant software for the first day. These do not need to be ticked off as boxes. All of them work towards the same goal: risk control, rather than a risk incident, a fine, or a lost deal.
This is where operational risk management comes in. It provides you with a straightforward perspective of your business and the questions you need to ask. What could go wrong? What is the probability of it occurring? What if you did, would it cost you anything? The first real skill in this process is to calculate the probability of a risk to happen. It is not the approximation. It’s a systematic process to prioritize the threats, allowing you to address the most significant ones rather than trying to solve every minor one.
Here, we explain each of these frameworks in simple terms. You will discover the requirements of PCI certification, the working of the SOC 2 audit, the new ISO/IEC 27701:2025 privacy standard and how to develop software that is HIPAA compliant without slowing your development team down. At the end of the day, you will have a plan for how you can make compliance part of your business, rather than a stressful deadline.
Operating risk management is the process of identifying, prioritising and minimising the risks that could impact your business in day-to-day business operations. These threats are due to individual, procedure, systems, or external events. Anything that disrupts your operation or causes a loss of customer information is considered operational risk.Operational risk includes a server outage, a phishing email, a vendor data leak, and non-compliance with deadlines. ORM has a repeatable process for identifying these issues before they become a problem or issue, rather than reacting to damage.
The path of most operational risk management programs are similar. The first step in the process is to recognize the risk. This involves identifying the potential issues you may experience in your business, whether IT-related or related to your daily operations. You then use a risk assessment matrix to measure both the likelihood and impact of each risk. Once this, you must then determine how to deal with the risk. It can be accepted, reduced, transferred and even avoided altogether. Last but not least, you track risks and keep an eye on them over time, as new threats emerge as you grow your company and as the technology evolves.
This process is important because it is the foundation of all the key compliance processes your business will encounter. All of the security certifications mentioned above are asking the same key question: Has your organization identified its risks and implemented actual controls to address them? Having a robust ORM program with a clearly defined risk appetite and a regular risk register, helps to make these audits much easier. It also helps to ensure that your team is aware of risks that pose a threat to the business and not just those that are most apparent. That’s why operational risk management is not an afterthought, but the starting point of security teams implementing NIST CSF and other widely recognized frameworks.
After identifying risks, the next step is to determine the probability that each identified risk will become a reality. It’s here where many teams stall out, as the term “likelihood” often sounds like educated speculation. In fact it’s quite simple to follow when you break it down into two elements of each risk decision: likelihood and impact.
Likelihood provides a sense of the likelihood of a risk event happening over a given timeframe, like a year. If that event actually happened, this is how much the event would hurt you as per the impact. These two go together to make a risk assessment matrix – one of the most trusted tools in operational risk management. For simple risk programmes the most common size of matrix is 3×3 and for more precise, 5×5. Both axes are typically rated at very high, very low, and the two ratings are added together to provide a definite priority rating for each risk.
Typically, teams use history of incidents, threat intelligence, industry metrics, and input from veteran personnel to achieve a likelihood score. Let’s take an example: a business that processes a lot of credit card transactions may classify the risk of a phishing attack as “high,” as it occurs frequently in the industry. A risk such as a significant natural hazard impacting a data centre could be considered low probability, but high impact. That’s where inherent risk and residual risk come in.
It is not a single-shot job to get likelihood scoring correct. As you change your systems, add new vendors to your supply chain, and new threats emerge in your industry, your risk levels change. Many security teams perform a quarterly review of their risk matrix and regard an annual review as the bare minimum, as do frameworks such as the NIST CSF. It is a continuous practice that auditors investigate when examining how ready you are to complete the PCI, SOC 2, ISO/IEC 27701:2025, and HIPAA compliant software certification processes. An used, updated risk matrix clearly demonstrates to regulators and customers that your risk management is not just a document in a drawer, but is genuine.
PCI certification is mandatory if your business is involved in any way with credit card payments, whether it’s accepting them, storing them, or processing or transmitting them. This is the minimum requirement throughout the payments industry for safeguarding cardholder information. PCI rules are set by the PCI Security Standards Council, which was established by Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover and JCB. Their aim is straightforward: ensure the safety of card data and minimize fraud in all businesses that interact with a payment.
PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) is the current standard. It is based on 12 fundamental requirements including network security, access control, encryption, monitoring, and frequent testing. They are the same for every small online business as well as every big payment processor, although the extent to which you need to do them is based on your PCI compliance level. The businesses that are categorized into four levels are classified based on the number of card transactions that they process annually. The strictest requirements are for Level 1 merchants, those with the highest volume of transactions, with an annual Report on Compliance submitted by a Qualified Security Assessor. Smaller merchants are able to sometimes use a Self-Assessment Questionnaire.
A common misconception is that of the term “certification. Unlike other standards bodies, PCI Security Standards Council does not issue a formal PCI certificate. As per their level, businesses receive an Attestation of Compliance, and either a Self-Assessment Questionnaire or a Report on Compliance. This documentation is submitted to your bank or payment processor to prove your systems meet PCI requirements. Despite the fact that this is more about compliance validation than a traditional certificate, this is still referred to in everyday conversation as “getting PCI certified.
PCI DSS v4.0.1 included a number of new requirements which came into effect in 2025 and will be enforced through 2026. These improvements feature improved multi-factor authentication regulations, tougher encryption requirements, and a move towards ongoing compliance, as opposed to an annual checklist. Instead, businesses are also encouraged to narrow their PCI scope by implementing tools such as tokenization and point-to-point encryption, which keep raw card data off their own servers from the get-go. This way, risk is reduced and the audit is quicker. For any business handling payments, having PCI certification is a practice, not a sprint to complete at the end of the year, and the best way to ensure that customers trust in your business is to keep them safe from penalties if they don’t.
PCI certification, SOC 2, ISO/IEC 27701:2025, and HIPAA compliant software are at first glance four very distinct certifications, four different audits, and four different projects. Many companies do just that, creating a checklist for each of them individually. This is time-consuming and falls short of what is needed, as these frameworks have a lot in common. It’s better to establish a single strong risk management base and then have each of these frameworks connect to it.
Pay attention to the controls that each standard is requesting and the overlap becomes evident. Access control is mentioned in PCI DSS, SOC 2’s Security criteria, ISO IEC 27701:2025’s privacy controls, and HIPAA’s technical safeguards. All of these frameworks are supported at the same time by a well-documented and well-reasoned risk assessment process, with a risk register and a working risk assessment matrix. Rather than performing four separate risk exercises, a mature security team performs one comprehensive program of operational risk management and assigns each security control to the appropriate framework that it meets.
This mapping process will also save real time during audits. Your SOC 2 auditor will ask for access reviews, and you will already have the evidence as it also supports your PCI DSS requirements, as well as your ISO/IEC 27701:2025 privacy controls. If your healthcare partner queries whether your software is HIPAA compliant, you can refer to the same monitoring and encryption systems already implemented in the SOC 2 review. Those that do plan this way up front claim better expedient audit processes, reduced compliance expenses, and no surprises from the introduction of new requirements like those from the HIPAA Security Rule updates for 2026 or the transition timeline for ISO/IEC 27701:2025. Publishing well-documented compliance achievements and certifications can also support off-page SEO by encouraging authoritative industry websites to reference and link to your business.
The important thing to remember is that your risk matrix is a live document, and not a report. Check it periodically, adjust likelihood and impact assessments as your business evolves and use it to guide decision making on where to invest in new controls. This approach to compliance actually makes PCI compliance, SOC 2, ISO/IEC 27701:2025 and HIPAA compliant software feel like less work. They are natural consequences of an existing risk management program that had been discharging its duties.
PCI compliance, SOC 2 compliance, ISO/IEC 27701:2025, and HIPAA compliant software appear to be four different mountains to climb, making it overwhelming to look at them all at once. However, as this guide has demonstrated, they all return to the same starting point – a robust operational risk management program. The rest is relatively easy once you understand how to identify risks and how likely a risk is to occur. No longer responding to each new requirement. You already have a great foundation for most of what these frameworks are asking.
Both frameworks still have their uses. Payment card data is secured by PCI DSS. SOC 2 provides your customers with evidence you are being responsible with their data. When you’re taking privacy seriously, ISO/IEC 27701:2025 demonstrates it to the world with an internationally-recognized standard. HIPAA compliant software ensures that patient information is protected and retains partners who are eager to work with you. None of these need to be assembled individually, however, one by one. If you’re mapping your controls only once and applying them to all of your audits, compliance is no longer a yearly crisis, it’s a way of doing business.
Then, put together your controls, making sure you think about the four frameworks, not just this audit in front of you. This saves time, saves money, and, most importantly, builds actual trust with the customers, partners and patients who are relying on you to manage their information.
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