The high cost and time spent on sustaining controls is one of the key challenges with compliance efforts. Many IT leaders find their risk and compliance responsibilities to be time-consuming and tedious, especially as dynamic risk environments require quick solutions to provide assurance.

The drive for automation enables organizations to optimize compliance spend and control testing strategies by improving processes and tools to reduce manual work. Automation programs should start with thoughtful upfront planning and analysis to identify any areas of synergy or potential weakness in organizations control ecosystems to ensure audits run efficiently and effectively.

It’s important to address enterprise level risk management as early and frequently as possible to sustain cost and time savings in processes. Here are 3 key areas to consider when starting your controls automation initiative:

• All programs come with trade-offs and establishing up-front where you want to invest time and resources is essential in planning your initial scope
• Organizations should limit the number of controls in the organization’s ecosystem and establish processes and frameworks that enable quick adaptation to change from external drivers such as NIST or Regulatory bodies as well as internal initiatives
• Automation of streamlined testing documentation, embed control tests at the code/developer level where possible, and identification of controls that might be suitable for fully automated execution, evidencing, and testing

Organizations interested in investing in automated solutions to update their control suite do not need to rebuild their entire ecosystem from scratch. Utilizing a prioritized incremental approach allows organizations to evaluate critical areas such as technology or past high-risk audit findings first.

Keying in on the areas that get you the best return on your output will be different for every organization, but Infinitive has a proven framework and tools to take organizations from their current control state to your definition of Automation nirvana. Infinitive will work with you through every step of the Automation journey, from planning to execution and tuning to ensure your controls automation program is efficient and effective.

For more information, start a conversation with us today.