Summary
Regulatory changes are raining down on businesses at a rapid rate. To keep up, organizations must find smarter ways to disseminate and action this information. In this article, we explain how centralized intranet platforms can play a part in meeting ever-changing requirements and boosting compliance.
A third of compliance professionals rank ‘regulatory change’ as their top compliance challenge.
One glance at the industry headlines, and it’s easy to see why.
Heavily regulated organizations, such as those within the financial services and healthcare sectors, have been inundated with new and revised frameworks in recent years. From the 2025 HIPAA reform to the impending Basel 3.1 update, there’s an excess of compliance tasks to keep up with. And many businesses are falling behind.
Indeed, around a fifth of compliance leaders describe their approach as being ‘moderately reactive’. In other words: they only respond to regulatory changes as and when they occur.
Compliance is at risk of becoming an afterthought.
But it doesn’t have to be this chaotic — even amidst rapid-fire regulatory change.
In fact, with a secure intranet platform, you can stay adaptive and reduce complexity considerably. Here’s how.
The role of a secure intranet in meeting regulatory challenges
It’s not just information overload that’s holding organizations back. It’s the dissemination of this information.
Compliance leaders need to read and digest the latest regulatory updates, make the relevant process changes, and then transfer any learnings onto their wider business.
It may seem straightforward when written down. But for organizations that suffer from “tech sprawl”, things can often fall apart. Without a dedicated communication and compliance management platform, insights get lost in translation. Those important findings you shared via email? They’re probably sitting in a spam folder. That bulletin you stuck on the office wall? It’s already been replaced by a poster for the local pub’s quiz night.
Important regulatory changes must be seen, heard and understood. Otherwise you risk non-compliance.
This is where a secure, feature-rich intranet can come to your aid. These platforms centralize your knowledge, processes, and people, and act as a single hub for your business operations and compliance efforts.
With the right platform, your compliance team can:
- Share regulatory news and updates proactively.
- Create, distribute, and track policies.
- Design processes for new frameworks and obligations.
- Plan for upcoming audits.
- Educate employees and deliver standardized training.
In short, intranets enable you to keep pace with change and adapt to any new requirements.
What features should you look for in an intranet platform for highly regulated sectors?
Before we get ahead of ourselves, it’s important to note that not all platforms are suitable for heavily regulated industries.
Yes, they may fit the needs of the average company. But do they offer the heightened security and functionality you need to adapt to regulatory changes?
This is a question you must ask yourself when researching any vendor. After all, as a highly regulated business, you can’t afford to put your data or customers at risk.
Bearing this in mind, here are 9 features any intranet for highly regulated industries should include:
1. Internal communications
Any intranet worth its salt should contain internal communications features for sharing important updates.
News apps are convenient for writing or AI-generating long-form updates, such as outlining new frameworks and obligations. Meanwhile, announcement capabilities enable you to share reminders for upcoming audits or compliance training and enforce acknowledgement.
2. RSS feeds
The less tabs and windows you need to sift through to find the latest regulatory news, the better.
Integrated RSS feeds allow you to consolidate news articles from industry experts and regulatory bodies without having to put in any work. This means there’s no risk of missing important insights during workload-heavy weeks; you can stay up to date whenever you log into your intranet.
3. Policy management
Regulatory changes and policy updates often go hand-in-hand. As such, your intranet platform should provide a dedicated tool for managing the complete policy lifecycle, from creation and review to distribution.
In Claromentis, our policy management application goes the extra mile by:
- Notifying employees of new or updated mandatory policies.
- Capturing employee acknowledgement.
- Providing AI assistance with a chatbot that ingests and summarizes each unique policy document.
- Tracking read and acceptance rates.
It’s a smarter way of keeping pace with industry standards and ensuring employees fully understand their obligations.
4. Learning management system
Sharing written best practices and guidance is all well and good… But it’s very difficult to retain information after reading a document once.
To ingrain new compliance knowledge into your culture, you need to take a more holistic approach. This means reinforcing your internal communications and policies with interactive, trackable e-learning courses.
Only a handful of intranet providers offer this kind of functionality.
At Claromentis, you have the option to bolt-on an integrated learning management system (LMS) to your intranet. The platform enables you to build SCORM-compliant courses, test employee knowledge, and track pass rates.
To support your ever-changing compliance requirements, set validity dates that require employees to re-take courses at specified dates. Each course completion creates a bespoke training certificate, which you can then use for evidence during your internal and external audits.
5. Knowledge base
Knowledge base applications enable you to build a growing library of process documentation, procedures, and FAQs that complement your policies and e-learning resources.
Built-in version controlling ensures employees can only access the most up-to-date knowledge, meaning everyone follows the current regulatory guidance.
6. Project and task management
Once a regulatory framework is set in stone and your organization receives the thumbs up, you’ll need to start turning words into actions.
This is where an integrated project management application can help you stay organized and coordinate any follow-up tasks — whether that’s building out new processes, revising policies, or hiring for a new internal role.
With progress bars and native discussion threads, you can keep track of your regulatory efforts and ensure everyone is working towards the same goal.
7. Process automation
Familiarizing yourself with a new requirement is one thing. Embedding it into your day-to-day procedures is another.
Take the new HIPAA updates as an example. In this revised framework, healthcare organizations must adapt their current PHI and data protection processes. This includes responding to any patient data access requests within 15 days (instead of 30).
For busy healthcare organizations, it may be easy to forget a detail as small as this. So, to prevent any instances of non-compliance, it’s better to automate as much as you can.
Intranets with integrated business process automation capabilities empower you to speed-up and standardize these processes with the help of no-code e-forms, traceable workflows, and customizable service-level agreements. So, when a patient requests access to their data, your employees will receive the notifications and assignments necessary to meet that 15-day timeline.
In addition to this, process automation capabilities can streamline evidence capture and ensure you’re better prepared for internal and external audits. There’s no inconsistencies or risk of human errors. Everything you need is within your secure intranet, ready for the auditors to assess.
8. Granular user permissions
Many data security regulations dictate that sensitive data should only be accessed by those who have legitimate reason. Therefore, any PII you store on your intranet must be carefully protected.
Granular user permissions ensure that only the right users can read, access and/or edit important data, processes, and content. This is crucial for complying with current regulations, as well as any future regulations your organization may be subjected to.
9. Flexible deployments
Granted, flexible deployments aren’t exactly an intranet “feature”. But they are an important consideration for highly regulated industries — especially in today’s volatile regulatory environment.
While SaaS deployments may be perfectly okay for some businesses, others require extensive data control. And this is something you can only achieve with a self-hosted or on-premise intranet.
At Claromentis, we support any form of self-hosting, whether you’re looking to set-up your intranet in-house or in a private, public, or sovereign cloud.
Claromentis: The right fit for regulated businesses
Regulatory change is a difficult but inevitable part of the modern business landscape. For heavily regulated sectors, it can feel like every step forward is followed by another two steps backwards.
In uncertain times like these, technology is your greatest asset.
With a secure, centralized intranet — built for your stringent requirements — you can keep on top of changing frameworks and strengthen compliance. All without sacrificing innovation.
Claromentis has helped many businesses, from financial institutions to legal firms, secure their data, enhance knowledge sharing, and suffuse compliance throughout their business. As one of the only digital workplace solutions that supports self-hosted deployments, we’re an ideal fit for highly regulated industries that require complete data control.
To find out more about our digital workplace for regulated industries, book a quick discussion call. We’ll walk you through our features, packages, and pricing, and build you a bespoke demo that you can trial for free for 30 days.
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