info@emagined.com
Automate to Reduce Compliance Time & Cost
87% of organizations - about nine-in-ten firms - are not leveraging appropriate compliance and IT governance procedures that if implemented, would significantly reduce costs, business disruptions and lost or stolen data. Instead, a majority of businesses and public institutions are still struggling with a significant number of annual compliance deficiencies, business disruptions, data losses and thefts. These could otherwise be minimized with better implemented IT policy compliance and security monitoring and management programs.
Organizations find themselves challenged with making the transition from constantly reacting to Audit requests to pro-actively preparing for Audit and compliance requests.Organizations are constantly audited, continually responding to the same audit request from different sets of auditors. Best-in-class organizations are beginning to measure the lost productivity as well as hard dollar expenses related to inefficiencies in their compliance process.
In the wake of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), industry thought that there would be relief, but instead, industry has realized that the pressure has shifted from comprehending the new regulations to working steadily to reducing the associated level of effort and costs associated with compliance.
Our clients' challenge:
"I cannot get out in front of the audit as my budgetary and resource constraints are barely enough to get us through the current audit, let alone prepare for the next one or take a proactive stance for audits occuring in the upcoming quarter." Our clients are constantly plagued by the financial pressures that sometime lead them to the wrong choices.
We have heard several times clients making statements like the following: “My team continues to provide the same evidence to different sets of internal and external auditors. I am confident that we have duplicate controls for various regulations, but I can't easily identify the overlap. The control management tool we purchased is merely a glorified control library, a basic document repository. We are spending so much time on audit that we don't have the resources to increase the level of service IT provides the business. Entitlement reviews continue to be frustrating as we spend more time translating configurations into information that is understandable by the business. We have trouble demonstrating that we have disseminated our policies to the end users and that they have accepted them. Our complex set of Access databases and Excel spreadsheets are no longer suitable for managing our controls. "
Many questions are typically left unanswered:
- Is it possible to force auditors to test automated tools and not do substantive testing?
- How do I measure the soft and hard costs associated with compliance?
- How do I eliminate the redundancy in my controls across regulations?
- I need to quantify the delta between our existing costs and what they would be post automation.
- Are auditors allowed to obtain evidence using our existing tools?
- Can my SOX control investment be leveraged for PCI?
The Solution: Compliance Automation Services
To respond to our client's requests, we offered flexible, cost effective, and scalable options to assist with compliance automation. Emagined Security can assist you assist your current compliance posture and associated costs, and help you forcast the difference after deployment of compliance automation tools. Emagined Security can help you from tool selection to deployment and management of your compliance solution.
- Emagined Security can provide you with a 3rd party review of your current compliance program and provide guidance about how you can leverage your existing investments to swiftly move towards automation, yielding time and cost reduction.
- Emagined Security's consultants have worked with over 30 Fortune 100 companies to identify inefficiencies in their existing compliance program to realize cost and time savings.
- Emagined Security conducts interviews with key Compliance management, data owners, administrators, and Internal Audit. Results from the interviews are evaluated in aggregate to identify ways that an organization can realize the largest reduction in time and cost associated with compliance efforts.
- Common reccomendations include: consolidation of reduandant and disparate compliance and risk dashboards; reduction of reduandant controls through control normalization; increasing the ratio of automated controls to IT dependant manual controls; upgrading existing control inventory from End User Calculation repositories such as Excel and Access; establishing a strategy to transition from reacting to audit requests to pre-empting them; leveraging tools to decrease the time required to respond to audit requests; and more.
