IT Risk, Compliance & Controls Assurance
In the rapidly changing world of IT Risk and Compliance, opportunities for upping our collective game abound. We are here to help ensure your organization is adequately protected and the hard work you do is measured and visible to all the right parties. We love what we do.
IT Risk Management
Unfortunately, many IT organizations do not have strong positive relationships with the rest of their organization or they are viewed as being “out of touch” with the business. A strong IT risk management program aligned with business risk can help drive and justify IT strategy, general decision making, investment planning, and even controls & assurance activity.
When it comes to controls and compliance, a strong risk management program can help ensure that controls are suitable to the environment. Applying too many controls where they are not needed can lead to unnecessary costs, frustrating “red tape” and a loss of agility. On the other hand, a lack of controls in the right areas will leave an organization vulnerable to an unacceptable level of risk.
We can help you align your IT Risk Management program with the business, thus increasing trust in IT, confidence in your control environment, and strengthening your relationship with the business while also helping to ensure support and investment are applied to the right areas, because the potential business impact of investing vs. not investing will be clearly articulated.
IT Business Continuity
With the recent trend of ‘going digital’ and increased automation of industrial control systems, thoughtful Business Continuity Disaster Recovery (BCDR) planning and testing is critical in order to keep your business operating and avoid the potential catastrophic affects of a cyber attack, change management issue, fire, flood or simple hardware failure.
- Identify the top critical systems in terms of business criticality and the associated potential financial and non-financial impacts of a system outage
- Identify “the stack”, infrastructure including databases, servers, networks, authentication methods, remote access, etc.
- Perform an assessment to help ensure that BCDR capability aligns appropriately with the potential business impact of a system outage.
- Enable ongoing monitoring of BCDR controls to help ensure that disaster recovery plans stay relevant. It is much too common for DR plans to go untouched for years, collecting dust, becoming out of date and more or less useless in the event they are needed for recovery.
- Enable a business as usual process so system criticality information is kept current for the top critical systems and remains useful for purposes of risk management, investment planning, business alignment and controls & assurance activity.
IT Compliance, Internal Audit
IT compliance hurdles such as PCI-DSS, SoX, GDPR and other government, data privacy regulations can be overwhelming, we can help you protect your organization from the impacts of non-compliance.
Internal Audit – Whether your Internal Audit department needs help with IT Audit oversight, planning, evaluating and explaining the impact of audit findings or just an extra pair of hands to help with the heavy lifting, we can help. We also can help decrease the overall audit footprint by working with the external auditors to help ensure appropriate controls evidence is obtained which will reduce time spent with the business
IT group – We can help prepare IT for an internal or external audit to help ensure the organization is adequately prepared with the right controls that are designed effectively and sufficient evidence to demonstrate operating effectiveness. A thoroughly prepared organization that provides auditors with easy access to evidence, may be able to negotiate lower audit fees as it makes the audit more straightforward and less complex for the auditor.
Compliance – With deep experience in helping organizations design PCI, SOX and Data Privacy compliance programs, we can help you design a fit-for-purpose compliance program that reduces business impact as much as possible, while reducing the risk of non-compliance.