Corporate Compliance Software and Security Information and Identity Management: In the last several years, dozens of new laws have been passed worldwide that are aimed at ensuring the security, integrity, and privacy of financial, consumer, and other sensitive data. The obligation to comply with these regulations and conform to their requirements has become foremost among business priorities, and identity management and other compliance software systems have been instrumental in meeting this obligation. In fact, identity management has played a key part in helping companies make compliance an integral and ongoing part of everyday business operations and systems management activities. Learn more about corporate compliance software, identity management systems and security information management system software.

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The Role of Identity Management. In the last several years, dozens of new laws have been passed worldwide that are aimed at ensuring the security, integrity, and privacy of financial, consumer, and other sensitive data. The obligation to comply with these regulations and conform to their requirements has become foremost among business priorities, and identity management has been instrumental in meeting this obligation. In fact, identity management has played a key part in helping companies make compliance an integral and ongoing part of everyday business operations.

But now that these companies are working on putting identity management and other systems and processes in place to readily maintain compliance, what’s the next step? Compliance will undoubtedly be an ongoing part of how they do business far into the future. But as achieving compliance becomes less of a difficult and expensive operational burden, will its role change? It is Sun’s position that companies that understand the ongoing nature of compliance and have taken steps to make it as painless as possible are now in a unique position to benefit from it. They can move beyond seeing compliance as an operational obligation, and instead seize upon it as a business opportunity.

Redefining Compliance as Everyday Business

As several recent laws were passed, requiring businesses to conform to a multitude of new and extensive requirements that protect the integrity and privacy of information, many businesses responded with understandable concern. Suddenly faced with the prospect of being audited at any moment to ensure that their operations were in compliance with these new laws, many businesses could not help but believe that compliance would be a very costly, time-consuming, burdensome effort that would take valuable resources away from emerging business opportunities. And they were right — to an extent.

Initially unprepared to comply with the new regulatory requirements, many businesses invested significant resources in efforts to meet those requirements. They spent money to develop processes that would meet compliance requirements; untold hours collecting evidence for audits; valuable human capital responding to audit demands and requests — all while core business priorities went neglected for lack of resources. Clearly, such an approach could not be sustained.

Implementing Identity Management for More Efficient Compliance

Because the mandate underlying these recently passed business regulations is to protect the integrity and security of information, identity management has a critical role to play in enabling companies to meet that mandate. As an automated solution for monitoring, tracking, reporting on, and auditing access to information and resources, it provides an efficient, effective means of enabling compliance. The following identity management capabilities can help businesses meet their compliance obligation more efficiently than efforts that are not driven by identity management.