Navigating Compliance Challenges

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.