SureCloud delivers BI into governance & risk cloud

SureCloud has brought a business analytics (BI) proposition into its IT Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution portfolio.

The SureCloud platform will now be augmented with a BI tool designed to help organisations gain insight into areas of supply chain risk.

NOTE: Auditing the supply chain for risk (or third party/supplier assurance as it is also known) is purported to be a growing area of concern for organisations in the UK.

The development team at SureCloud suggests that “tight deadlines and stretched resources” already make running these programmes challenging enough, but (says SureCloud) the information collected from the supply chain is not realised to its full potential.

“Already our platform removes the need for customers to operate spread-sheet based programmes and frees up highly skilled compliance and risk personnel from extensive administration tasks,” said Richard Hibbert, CEO of SureCloud.

The firm is bidding to delivering efficiency gains to this process with the launch of this new analytics offering – it is designed to enable organisations to make better business decisions based on risk across the whole supplier portfolio.

Hibbert continues, “What’s really interesting for management is that by applying analytics to this whole area we can help them make more informed business decisions regarding third party risk – answering questions like: which are my worst performing suppliers?; do I want to continue to trade with them?; and which compliance requirements are all of my suppliers struggling to meet?.”

Key features of the SureCloud Platform include:

• Ability to implement your own supplier questionnaires or leverage SureCloud’s template questionnaires including supplier risk calculations
• Fine grained permissions to provide different Form views based on Stakeholder Groups
• Integrated Task Management to alert users to events such as compliance certificate expiry, or to allocate activity to internal or external stakeholders
• Interfaces with common business intelligence tools such as Microsoft Office pivot tables for slicing & dicing data and creation of “what if” scenarios
• Dashboards and reporting  to provide real-time updates on progress – plus analytics to identify patterns such as top or bottom performing suppliers
• Coordination of Third Party Assurance with risk management activities

The sentiments expressed here are echoed by Shop Direct Group, a recent adopter of the SureCloud Platform, “Our comprehensive third party compliance programme requires a robust compliance tool to help us demonstrate that our customer data is secure regardless of its physical location,” said Mike Marshall, Group Security Director at Shop Direct Group. “SureCloud will make managing the due diligence process with our third parties much more straightforward, eliminate the need for e-mailing spread sheets backwards and forwards as we did in the past and have the versatility to support our future needs.”

The SureCloud platform automates the security management and information compliance process without forcing organisations to adopt entirely new practices. This  flexibility is said to allow firms to automate any IT Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) process, such as Compliance Audits, Policy Management, Risk Assessments or Third Party Assurance programmes.

NOTE: The SureCloud Platform supports an Agile (programming) approach to implementation and includes pre-built templates, which means that the solution can be deployed quickly.