Case Study
Hyperproof Helps You Break Out of the Spreadsheet Loop and Mature Your Compliance Program
Guidacent is a business and technology consulting firm that specializes in executing critical projects in the areas of Project and Program Leadership, Operations Effectiveness, IT and Cloud Solution Delivery, Business Analysis, and Interim Leadership.
Quick Facts: Technology Consulting // United States
The Challenge
Editor’s Note: This article is written by Derek Mullen, Cybersecurity Practice Manager at Guidacent.
I’ve spent much of my career working in spreadsheets. It used to be very hard accessing reporting to make critical business decisions. With budget constraints and competing IT priorities, I remember my fellow business users (including myself) saying “just provide me an extract, and I’ll build what I need in a spreadsheet.” Fortunately technologies have improved, yet many of us continue relying heavily on spreadsheets for analysis and reporting. We’re familiar with these tools, and in many cases, we don’t understand the alternative options.
With this mindset, many companies build their compliance programs using a “patchwork” of spreadsheets to manage details and track progress. This can work at the beginning, but teams quickly realize spreadsheets create inefficiencies and become barriers to effectively scale and mature compliance programs. Details are often missed as teams struggle with version control, and sensitive information can easily end up in the hands of the wrong people. This makes collaboration difficult, with more time spent ensuring data integrity and manual report generation than making key business decisions.
It’s important to break this spreadsheet loop when operationalizing governance and compliance programs, especially when businesses want to get new products and services to market. There are just too many moving parts and stakeholders to effectively scale compliance programs through spreadsheets.
Fortunately, Hyperproof offers a cost-effective way to quickly mature your compliance programs. The SaaS solution provides insights into the adoption of new control frameworks, tracks key components of control health, and provides out-of-the box drillable reporting. It also simplifies the audit process for compliance managers and their auditors because compliance managers can easily associate evidence with corresponding audit requests.
Key Benefits of Working with Hyperproof
Set Up
Compliance programs are complex, so having a basis for organizing them consistently is essential. Hyperproof provides the means to select compliance framework requirements applicable to your organization and overlays a number of suggested or custom controls to demonstrate effectiveness. Hyperproof suggested controls come through program templates that will reduce time required to establish a new program. As you refine your compliance program, you can re-evaluate which requirements apply to your business and adjust your controls to meet those requirements.
Tracking
Hyperproof uses implementation and testing status fields, along with the concept of “Freshness” to track and control health. Freshness allows you to set an expiration date on a control, which sends automated alerts to proactively remind owners of required actions ahead of due dates. Both freshness and control health are displayed throughout the application, calling attention to items that need the most immediate attention. Placing the management of control in the hands of control owners relieves the compliance team of extra manual efforts and continuous follow-up.
Collaboration
Hyperproof allows you to invite and assign collaborators to programs or controls, as appropriate. Depending on their permissions, collaborators may make updates to a control and add comments. Users with access to control information can easily see updates within the application’s Activity Feed. This helps avoid confusion and improves efficiencies, as Hyperproof becomes your single source of truth for collaboration.
Drillable Reporting
Hyperproof dashboards provide senior leadership a quick view of overall program health. These drillable dashboards also offer a self-service solution for compliance managers to track their corrective actions, proof of control implementation, and maintenance activities. This frees up the compliance team to focus on strategic decisions rather than manually generating various stakeholder reporting.
Final Thoughts
Spreadsheets have served us well in the past, but compliance teams need a better tool to effectively scale their programs. Hyperproof is the smarter alternative. It provides options for quickly establishing your detailed compliance programs, captures data inputs, and serves as a single source of truth for cross-team collaboration between teams (including status tracking and audit evidence).
Spreadsheets have served us well in the past, but compliance teams need a better tool to effectively scale their programs. Hyperproof is the smarter alternative. It provides options for quickly establishing your detailed compliance programs, captures data inputs, and serves as a single source of truth for cross-team collaboration between teams (including status tracking and audit evidence).
Derek Mullen
Cybersecurity Practice Manager // Guidacent
Conclusion
With Hyperproof, Guidacent was able to create a single source of truth for compliance and automated routine, repetitive work, steamlining workflows and reducing work for teams across the organization.
To see the Hyperproof platform in action, schedule a demo with our team today.
