Guarantee legally compliant software use in your company
The legal framework and requirements that you as a company must observe and comply with are extremely complex. Depending on the industry and economic areas in which you operate, there are often additional specific regulations whose compliance you must also prove in audits.
This is not just about security standards in production, but of course also about data security - and this means that your software must also meet the compliance requirements to which you are subject as a company.
What is Software Compliance Management?
Software Compliance Management makes it possible to use largely automated processes to ensure that your software meets all compliance regulations and that the assignment of rights and access to data also complies with the regulations that you as a company must observe.
With the appropriate software, the current status quo as well as changes made can be documented in such a way that you can provide auditors with complete proof of how you comply with the regulations. Software Compliance Management is therefore an important part of your Risk Management.
Why is Software Compliance Management important?
You are responsible for how your company handles customer data, but also for the security of your internal information.
ALWAYS IMPLEMENT UP-TO-DATE RULES
Therefore, you are obliged to deal with the relevant rules, standards, regulations and laws. They all result in different obligations; violations of them can sometimes result in severe penalties.
This starts with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and does not end with the DSAG guide for ERP audits in SAP systems.
Depending on your industry, you may need to demonstrate HIPAA compliance or follow Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) rules; if you process credit card payments, compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) is important.
All of these regulations are continually updated, changed and adapted to new circumstances. It's difficult enough to keep track of everything here in policy management. But of course you want to keep the liability risk as low as possible.
To ensure that your software also complies with these regulations, it is necessary to be able to control and document access and all business processes relevant to compliance.
LACK OF STANDARDIZATION
Since guidelines can vary widely from industry to industry and region to region - not all areas have truly overarching standards - it is often very difficult to determine compliance for your software with certainty.
OUTDATED OR INCONSISTENT SOFTWARE
The IT systems of a company are usually an evolved landscape with all kinds of uncontrolled growth. Time and again, you will find isolated applications that were purchased for good reasons, but are no longer easy to connect or are simply outdated.
These solutions in particular must be thoroughly checked for compliance - and this also includes whether the data transfer to newer systems has been or can be implemented without risks.
How does Identity & Access Management help with Software Compliance Management?
Suitable Identity & Access Management (IAM) tools are important building blocks for establishing and ensuring software compliance. Once it has been verified that the software and IT systems basically meet the compliance requirements, automated rights and access control ensures that the corresponding regulations are also adhered to in day-to-day operations.
The key benefits of combining your Software Compliance Management system with IAM:
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Automated compliance processes: Through centrally defined, automatically implemented steps in onboarding, offboarding (user provisioning) and Access Management, you clearly assign rights to your employees based on responsibilities, reducing opportunities for human error - with minimal control costs.
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Centralized management, common standards: Centralized management of access rights and rules of conduct enables compliance rules to be implemented consistently across all systems, departments, and applications. These capabilities allow enterprise-wide standards to be enforced even when very different software systems from different vendors are in use.
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Visibility and security: Centralized IAM solutions enable the status quo of current measures to be made visible without delay. The systems can monitor user activity and send out automatic alerts in the event of problematic behavior. In this way, immediate countermeasures can be initiated in the event of problems or conflicts - even automatically if required.
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Documentation and reporting: With an IAM system, the current compliance status can always be queried and documented.