digital accelerated The transformation driven by the overnight shift to working from home during the Covid-19 pandemic fundamentally transformed our work and personal lives. Unprecedented connectivity has given rise to a new information network and has ultimately changed business strategies and processes forever.

Along with these changes, innovation and transformation have become business imperatives, as digital technologies have seen structures and processes and even entire value chains evolve beyond recognition. However, hand in hand with emerging opportunities, there are a series of new risks, such as attacks against digital infrastructures, data theft and abuse of digital communication channels.

A modern approach to GRC

At the same time, a business environment marked by continued market volatility and an increasingly stringent regulatory environment has placed increased pressure on entities across all sectors to adapt their processes to ensure compliance. Yesterday’s governance, risk and compliance (GRC) solutions are silos and simply not designed to cope with the complexity of today’s dynamic compliance and regulatory environments, both locally and internationally. And as new global mandates and compliance directives continue to be introduced on an almost daily basis, companies must adopt a modern approach to GRC to fully integrate risk management initiatives with ongoing business processes. And they have to do it now.

In any rapidly changing risk landscape, legacy tools are less effective and data collected during intermittent assessments quickly becomes out of date. This is why companies need effective risk mitigation that includes continuous monitoring to provide a near real-time, up-to-date view of risk exposure. The new standard in risk management must introduce continuous, always-on monitoring capabilities of a full stack of risk domains, fully integrated into an enterprise’s GRC platform.

Addressing GRC challenges

Marshall is a member organization of cheers, and as an IBM Gold Business Partner, offers the IBM OpenPages GRC Platform, which provides today’s organizations with a complete set of core solutions aimed at addressing GRC challenges. This platform provides a comprehensive view of the organization’s external risk environment with automated continuous risk monitoring and near real-time risk intelligence.

open pages harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and automation, identifies potential risks, and collects, validates, and analyzes risk data to identify events that have the potential to disrupt business operations. It enables near real-time risk metrics, risk ratings, risk reporting, risk event alerts, and risk actions on all items being monitored. More importantly, OpenPages provides an integrated view of risk across the spectrum of risk domains, allowing organizations to incorporate their risk appetite, tolerances, thresholds, and scores into each domain.

Take advantage of innovative tools

The platform makes it easy to manage risk and regulatory challenges, as well as the inevitable changes that are a constant in today’s digital world. It does this through its ability to analyze large volumes of structured and unstructured data from emerging and pervasive sources, including social media and cybersecurity systems. In addition, OpenPages with Watson leverages tools such as robotic process automation (RPA), machine learning, and AI to automate mundane and burdensome tasks and help with data collection and validation; sentiment analysis as well as impact analysis to establish the potential impact of risk on the business. Using these features frees up valuable human resources to focus on business-critical tasks, rather than collecting and validating data. Additionally, they can save time identifying risks and minimize false positives.

The platform also integrates with IBM Watson knowledge catalog (WKC), which powers intelligent, self-service discovery of business assets like data, models, and reports across your enterprise. The WKC integration supports OpenPages data privacy management by performing privacy assessments and compliance reporting. This gives risk professionals the confidence they need to build models that are compliant with relevant regulations.

Full risk visibility

The platform also helps address another major problem, cybersecurity, albeit indirectly. With higher levels of automation, more data is shared and exposed across the organization. And while companies can implement security operations centers (SOCs) and have monitoring tools for intrusion detection, they must still implement controls to manage their risk of exposure. They need to understand what your policies are in terms of legal obligations, such as communicating with stakeholders and the public after a breach. Business leadership must have complete visibility into their risks and potential exposure to be able to do this effectively, and OpenPages provides this.

There are other ways that OpenPages help companies achieve their business goals. While a primary goal for all companies is to be in good compliance status (which is also a requirement for public company reporting these days), many companies also want to be good corporate citizens. This is why OpenPages can implement a governance layer throughout the organization, making people accountable for the proper implementation of all established controls. For example, if an external partner is having financial problems, or perhaps doing something inappropriate, the right people within the organization, such as C-level executives, are aware and can take appropriate steps to ensure they can respond. appropriately to any questions from the public or the media.

These features and more are key to ensuring continuous operations, maintaining stakeholder trust, and meeting societal and regulatory obligations.

About the cheers
cheers is a leader in business digital enablement and a leader in people enablement. We drive change and business strategy with integrated technology processes and expertise, but we believe that for your business to run smoothly, both internally and externally, aligning this technology and processes with your employees is paramount.

  • The author, Jaco van der Merwe, is a program manager at Ovations
  • Read more Ovations articles on TechCentral
  • This promoted content was paid for by the interested party