Regulatory Compliance
There seem to be more regulations to address every day, and
just when you finish complying with them, lawmakers change the
rules. SOX, HIPAA, GLBA, Basel II, EU DPD — the list can
seem daunting. Businesses in nearly every industry face many
issues, regulations and pending legislation affecting how business
is conducted. Organizations can’t afford to respond to
each regulation with a labor and cost intensive one-off process.
They need to adopt a strategic architecture that maximizes their
investments and limits the cost of a new regulation or change
to a law and associated reporting requirements.
But despite the acronyms and increasingly complex global regulatory
environment, regulations generally share some traits that can
be leveraged to reduce the compliance and associated operational
burdens. Organizations that strongly manage process and controls
through a compliance architecture can quickly and easily reduce
individual regulatory impact. Best practice based compliance
architectures address this by leveraging the underlying technology
architecture to better document and, when needed, change the
business process.
By reducing different regulations to their core, we can identify
areas of maximum overlap and reduce expenditures. While Compliance
management won’t solve all of your regulatory headaches,
it helps in three significant ways:
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- Improves understanding of operational
business processes, and allows for enforcement,
monitoring and testing.
- Provides documentation and
tracking over time.
- Reporting is a by product
of the documentation effort.
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The goal of a compliance architecture is simply to implement
controls that manage, document and ensure compliance. These controls
can either prevent undesired events or detect undesired events.
A compliance architecture supports the integration of controls
into an organization by centralizing technology controls as appropriate
and using technology to help enforce process controls. Some examples
of technology controls include:
The foundation of our compliance architecture solution is solid
security and business continuity planning practices, information
and document life cycle management, and business process management.
By building upon and standardizing this foundation, adding business
intelligence and a compliance tool for reporting, organizations
can deploy a solid compliance strategy, architecture and environment.
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