Navigating Compliance Challenges

How a Leading Technology Firm Met Strict Regulatory Requirements with Compliance Management Services

20+

year relationship with this global technology firm

Prowess Team

25+

Prowess editors and software engineers involved

Compliance

20+

years of providing compliance services to enterprise tech firms

A Top Technology Firm Satisfies Regulatory Requirements Through Compliance Managed Services

A major technology firm that must meet strict regulatory requirements engaged Prowess Consulting to provide compliance management expertise to meet these needs.

 

Background

Among the many challenges organizations face are compliance requirements and regulatory laws. Organizations are discovering that they must adhere to an ever-growing list of compliance obligations—with an increasing level of effort required on their part to adequately comply with regulatory requirements. Organizations failing to meet compliance obligations can find their reputations damaged and might be subject to substantial fines or penalties.

What are Compliance Managed Services?

The compliance managed service (CMS) business model enables organizations to outsource regulatory compliance management. The CMS model comes in different forms. For example, compliance and audit processes can be maintained for an organization as a layer of software-as-a-service (SaaS). Software tools and agents connect to content and data repositories to help ensure that an organization maintains compliance. Control mechanisms prevent the removal, duplication, or transmission of regulated data. Perhaps an organization stores customer health information or personal identifiable information (PII) in a cloud or in network storage where it’s available through in-house applications. This data can be overseen by a CMS provider using infrastructure tools and monitoring to control the data’s availability and usage.

Another example of employing a compliance managed service provider is by engaging expertise through consultants. In addition to leveraging tools and monitoring, an outside consultant or third party brings expertise to research, implement, and manage a compliance solution for the client organization. These customized processes not only address the specific needs of the customer but can also lead to increased efficiency and cost reductions.

CMS solutions help organizations manage their compliance obligations. By engaging CMS software providers or consulting experts, organizations can better ensure that they’re following regulatory requirements, reducing their risk of non-compliance, maintaining audit readiness, and focusing on their core business goals.

Case Study: Compliance Managed Services Through Prowess Consulting

A major technology firm published its own APIs for a wide range of software tools and services used by outside developers. APIs are contract-based services available through HTTP web protocols to act on or provide data. A weather service’s API, for example, might return the current weather conditions for a specific location by calling the API and adding the location code as a parameter. Any change or update made to the API’s interfaces or parameters can break the API for an end user, unless the end user is aware of the changes and adapts their code accordingly.

For this major technology firm, regulators demanded that:

  • Changes or updates published to APIs must occur within a specified time frame.
  • Engineering teams test changes to APIs prior to release to end users.
  • Effective and up-to-date change logs and documentation notify changes for end users.

The firm engaged Prowess Consulting to support these requirements. By applying the essential values of our core process—engaging with the client, understanding their workflow, formulating a plan, and delivering a high-quality solution—we were able to bring in our expertise to standardize the API documentation releases for this major technology firm. As we worked to address the customer’s needs, our consultants found ways to increase efficiency and reduce costs.

Challenges and Expectations

As organizations face ever more compliance obligations, they must determine whether the compliance managed services approach—and which type of CMS—best suits their needs. Organizations also face specific challenges to meet compliance requirements. These challenges may include maintaining records for outside audits, establishing data security controls, and training staff to understand compliance processes.

Deploying compliance software through a CMS provider entails certain risks, including:

  • Accountability: Even with software controls in place, customers of CMS providers can be held responsible for any failures to keep in compliance with regulations and other requirements.
  • Provider dependency: Organizations can become dependent on the CMS provider’s services, tools, and expertise. If the provider encounters issues or downtime, the organization’s compliance and operations could be affected.
  • Limited visibility: Users of software controls through CMS providers might have limited visibility into compliance activities.
  • Cost: Purchasing compliance software through a CMS provider can be expensive for organizations with complex compliance needs.

Alternatively, engaging expert consultants to craft a custom compliance solution for your organization also comes with challenges. Instead of relying primarily on automation and software, expertise and attention to detail are critical for success.

When providing our expertise with compliance management, Prowess engages with our clients to understand their obstacles and issues, to deliver a quality solution through optimized tools and processes.

Solution

For this major technology firm, Prowess Consulting demonstrated its ability to be nimble and follow its process when deploying its expertise through Compliance Managed Services.

A team of approximately 30 editors and software testers was assigned to engineering groups with the technology firm. Working with these engineering groups, Prowess editors and testers helped to craft a software development, integration, testing, deployment, and documentation release process that met the compliance requirements specified by regulators.

This process involved Prowess editors working with engineering groups, collecting information and documenting upcoming API changes. After completion of development and internal testing, the engineers would pass on their API changes to the Prowess software testers for quality assurance (QA) testing. With the completion and acceptance of testing results, engineering groups would initiate the code release and publish the API(s) to production. The Prowess editors would then update the change log and finalize the documentation for end users regarding any processes, tasks, and steps they would need to do differently to use the updated APIs. This enabled the end users to work effectively with the updated APIs as soon as the updated documentation became available to them, without the need for ramp-up time.

Results

Not only did our involvement help keep the technology firm’s APIs in compliance with regulators’ requirements, but our software-development practices, testing, and delivery steps helped improve overall efficiency and reduce costs.

Key Takeaways

The major technology firm made use of the following Compliance Managed Services offered by Prowess Consulting:

  • Compliance implementation and management
  • Monitoring and reporting
  • Training and awareness
  • Risk assessment and mitigation
  • Audit and compliance consulting

By outsourcing compliance functions to the expertise provided by Prowess Consulting, organizations can:

  • Reduce costs and administrative burdens.
  • Increase accuracy and efficiency.
  • Focus on core business operations.
  • Better ensure compliance with complex regulations.
  • Achieve audit readiness.

By making use of Compliance Managed Services, organizations are able to overcome the challenges of ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements by reducing risk and focusing on their core business goals.

Learn more at prowessconsulting.com or contact us at info@prowessconsulting.com.

 

 

 

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