The security industry consists of an extremely broad set of communities, overarching goals, capabilities, and day-to-day activities. The purpose of each, in one form or another, is to better secure systems and applications and reduce risks within the ever-changing threat landscape.
Compliance represents a necessary aspect to security risk management, but is frequently regarded as a dirty word in security. There is a good reason for this. The term compliance invokes feelings of near-zombie-like adherence to sets of bureaucratically-derived requirements, which are tailored to mitigate a broad set of static threats. That's a mouthful of justifiable negativity.
We'll let you in on a second, dirty, not-so-much-of-a secret in our community: compliance, by itself, fails to actually secure systems; unless, that is, the regimen includes a lot of practical, dynamic processes that result in continuous improvement.
That said, security is only one...