Scalable Compliance Tools for Financial and Health Sectors

IT GRC is aimed at providing complete protection to the organization, with governance, risk and compliance requirements in mind. And Identity audit is the baseline to determine if the enterprise protection is adequate or not. The identity auditing solutions for financial and health sectors need to be scalable and flexible in nature to accommodate their fast growth.

Since financial institutions are constantly expanding their customer base and are adding more investments; they need a highly secure tool to consolidate security information across the enterprise. Healthcare industries maintain large volumes of patient information, in different sections of the hospital. So, the tools for healthcare and financial compliance should provide a comprehensive view of access to all the resources in the organization. In this way, audit requirements can be met and overall organizational efficiency can improve.

Scalable Compliance Tools for Financial and Health Sectors

IT GRC is aimed at providing complete protection to the organization, with governance, risk and compliance requirements in mind. And Identity audit is the baseline to determine if the enterprise protection is adequate or not. The identity auditing solutions for financial and health sectors need to be scalable and flexible in nature to accommodate their fast growth.

Since financial institutions are constantly expanding their customer base and are adding more investments; they need a highly secure tool to consolidate security information across the enterprise. Healthcare industries maintain large volumes of patient information, in different sections of the hospital. So, the tools for healthcare and financial compliance should provide a comprehensive view of access to all the resources in the organization. In this way, audit requirements can be met and overall organizational efficiency can improve.

Track Access with IAM Solutions

With organizations expanding their bases globally, keeping a tab on user transactions and employee activities is a cumbersome process. As compliance requirements continue to grow, especially healthcare compliance, organizations need to secure enterprise information across all locations. Identity management solutions ideally suit this scenario. The centralized control of identity access can solve most security issues in any organization.

Identity management provides the vital link between people, process and technology. Considering the insurance compliance scenario, identity management systems can reduce the time for overall insurance processing and overhead costs associated with leakage or theft of insurance documents. These systems also help in IT governance and managing IT risk issues thereby covering all security and compliance issues for the organization.

Extending GRC enterprise wide is beneficial

With GRC, the processes of IT governance, IT risk and IT compliance; which existed in silos has been combined for more effective and efficient transacting of business processes. By combining governance with risk and compliance information, management can monitor transactions throughout the enterprise, reduce risks and also ensure that compliance regulations are met. IT GRC improves the identity audit process and provides transparency into the enterprise-wide user identity and access rights auditing.

Better communication and centralized information transfer is certainly beneficial to any business process. Transfer of information from one department to another may result in information fatigue or loss of information. However by consolidating the process of communication from various departments, enterprises save on time and cost.

Why do you need identity management?

Identity management and identity access management are two essential components for large organizations, especially when it concerns security of critical information within the organization. Most organizations have multiple departments with multiple authentication processes and many possibilities for complication. Identity lifecycle management with proper identity auditing, assisted by automated identity management software can simplify administrative processes without compromising security.

The process of identity management starts with authentication. The system first recognizes who you are, authenticates your access to various resources within organization. Identity management also helps consolidate your different identities within the organization leading to simplification of administrative processes. It helps in reducing cost and increasing efficiency at different levels within the organization. Enterprise identity management is the most important aspect of compliance requirement. Be it financial compliance, healthcare compliance or insurance compliance, it is required that a company keeps tab on who has access to what in order to enforce compliance.

Challenges Faced in Corporate Compliance

Companies today are subjected to immense pressure from regulatory compliance like never before. Be it financial compliance , healthcare compliance or insurance compliance, the pressure can be felt all sectors. Organizations are expected to allocate 23% more IT budget to manage compliance related issues. The good news is that by implementing compliance processes, organizations can have a positive influence over corporate governance and efficient identity management processes leading to transparency and security within the organizations.

Analyzing the challenges faced by the compliance world, convergence of multiple processes is the need of the hour. The major challenge for compliance has been the exponential growth of digital information, which has lead to information theft and data breaches. The use of wireless devices is causing security concerns within organizations. In the digital communication era, the boundary between wanted and unwanted visitors is very thin line. Organizations need to address these challenges for effective regulatory compliance management.

Automation, an important step towards GRC

IT GRC refers to the combined effort of IT governance, IT risk and IT compliance. For perfect implementation of GRC, different components need to be set in place including IT infrastructure, IT controls, and other applications that make up the infrastructure. The most important step includes automation of audit and compliance processes within an organization.

Identity audit and compliance processes are too laborious to be handled manually and chances of human errors are high. Implementing an automated process for audit and compliance certainly helps Government, Risk and Compliance. An identity based solution helps in diverse capabilities and multiple processes, including audit and compliance. An identity solution with directory capabilities helps in consolidating information regarding identity access management
throughout the enterprise.

Identity Management – What is next?

The latest trend in identity management platform is the concept of OpenID. OpenID is especially for internet users. It’s a universal sign in process for all the websites. Most websites that we visit today want us to identify ourselves first. An identity audit is performed before we get access information on the site. As we keep signing into each one of them, we end up having multiple user IDs and passwords. However with Open ID you could access various websites using a single identity.

This is somewhat similar to the single sign on system in identity access management. Open ID has been getting a lot of attention these days, with lot of big online players pledging themselves into the system. There is an Open ID directory which has the list of sites, who have pledged for Open ID system. The buzz is that year 2008 would be the year of Open ID.

Companies resort to IT GRC in this downturn to reduce risk

 

With the economies taking a downturn, companies are now keen on strengthening their IT GRC spends. By strengthening their GRC spends companies look at protecting themselves against all sorts of risks including frauds and money laundering. It is estimated that GRC related technologies will grow up to 7.4% from last year. It’s a only slight drop from 8.5% to which it grew last year.

IT GRC includes IT Governance, IT risk and IT compliance. IT GRC gives a unified view of these 3 aspects, which were remaining in silos all these years. It’s relatively a new concept but is gaining in popularity. The use of IT GRC could be felt in identity auditing and compliance related issues including, financial compliance, healthcare compliance or insurance compliance.

Identity Management – What is next?

The latest trend in identity management platform is the concept of OpenID. OpenID is especially for internet users. It’s a universal sign in process for all the websites. Most websites that we visit today want us to identify ourselves first. An identity audit is performed before we get access information on the site. As we keep signing into each one of them, we end up having multiple user IDs and passwords. However with Open ID you could access various websites using a single identity.

This is somewhat similar to the single sign on system in identity access management. Open ID has been getting a lot of attention these days, with lot of big online players pledging themselves into the system. There is an Open ID directory which has the list of sites, who have pledged for Open ID system. The buzz is that year 2008 would be the year of Open ID.