Some IT Departments in Financial Services firms would like to pretend that compliance is not an IT issue. On the contrary, compliance is everyone’s issue and it is not going away.

As many IT professionals are discovering, the more Dodd-Frank, MiFID and similar regulations are being enforced around the world, regulators are becoming less tolerant of firms feigning ignorance. In a world where leniency was once the norm for non-compliance, regulators are now levying swifter and stiffer penalties for failure to comply.

So for IT Departments that want to make their firms compliant, here are three areas in where they should consider investing their firm’s resources:

Voice Recording Technologies – Investing in advanced systems can not only add peace of mind with regard to covering compliance needs, but can also provide valuable data from speech analytics that help a firm operate more effectively or gain a competitive edge.

Proactive System Monitoring – Investing in monitoring services can help firms discover potential problems before they become full-blown incidents disrupting their trading putting them at risk of non-compliance. Daily system health checks for both voice and data, and end-to-end network visibility can provide valuable information that helps reduce and/or eliminate the occurrence and severity of incidents.

Managed Services Support – Investing in managed services can not only allow you to better develop, monitor and maintain trading communications infrastructures, but also will supplement your IT team’s capabilities (without adding employee headcount) and increase expertise in areas that are not its core strengths.

And while these three pieces are important, even more critical is collaboration amongst chief compliance officers, risk managers, general counsel, CFOs, chief technology officers and other business leaders for firms wishing to become compliant. Each of these groups have their own essential knowledge and perspectives that need to be shared with the others and understood to develop the best and most cost effective, comprehensive compliance solution.

Putting all the compliance puzzle pieces together can be tricky, but by starting with three big pieces and involving all of your key business influencers, your company will be well on its way to having the complete picture, instead of one that is riddled with holes yet to fill.