Business Intelligence Tools Benefits: Empowering GRC Teams

A data analyst and a GRC professional walk into a bar….

Sounds like the start of a good joke?

It doesn’t have to be.

Compliance leaders know that the secret sauce to Compliance is data. Lots of it. But more importantly, Compliance leaders have to know what to do with the data. According to a Gartner study on the need for automation of data and analytics, 49% of business leaders named data integration a top-ranked priority. 37% prioritized data preparation and cleansing, and 36% said they needed automation for business decisions. The need to provide Compliance leaders with integrated, enriched, and actionable data is twofold; First, GRC teams require data infrastructure that is specific to their Compliance posture. Second, they must integrate that Compliance-based data with data from across all areas of the organization to gain a wider view of the organization's overall security posture. And that is where Business Intelligence tools benefits come in.

Business Intelligence (BI) Definition

Business intelligence (BI) is the science of analyzing massive amounts of structured and unstructured data to help inform the organization’s decision-making process. BI tools utilize machine learning to analyze data sets that are too complex for traditional methods – or even a team of dedicated Compliance professionals – to handle. 

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Business Intelligence Tools to Make Sense of Data

In many businesses, data may come from a wide range of disparate sources at unprecedented speed, including text, audio, images, and video that can be generated from transactional data, social media, third parties, and smart devices. Business Intelligence integration uses tools to take the data sets from both internal and external sources and put them into a context that can be fully actionable by the business. This architecture, which is used to standardize data for specific purposes of analysis, is known as the data fabric. Having an automated and continuous data fabric allows organizations to scale and customize their data modeling to be used in the future for new use cases and frameworks that are currently out of scope.

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Advantages of BI Tools: Drive Compliance with Data Analysis

Far from the joke about the bar, when BI data analysts and GRC teams collaborate, great things can happen. It’s a classic case of 1+1 = 3. 

Modern Compliance tools pull data from sources such as HR, operations, development, etc. These tools restructure, process, and analyze the data, creating the organization’s Compliance data fabric, which can be used by GRC teams to gain a wider view of their Compliance posture. But the organization has access to a massive amount of additional information. Information that is just sitting and waiting to be analyzed. Information that can be used to, for instance:

• identify policy gaps 
• make predictions 
• continuously manage risk, and 
• improve the overall security posture. 

And this is where Compliance and Business Intelligence go hand in hand.

Business Intelligence + Compliance Data = Endless Possibilities

‍Applying BI tools to Compliance data, and analyzing it alongside other facets found in the company's data fabric, enables GRC teams to take a bird’s-eye view of the entire organization and make strategic decisions based on a wider and more robust data set. 

When GRC teams collaborate with data analysts to mine the insights that can be found within the organization’s data and use BI tools for Compliance data analytics, the sky is the limit. Tapping into the organization’s underlying data fabric and taking advantage of the data pooled there from a wide array of sources not only gives GRC teams greater visibility across the organization’s Compliance posture, it also arms them with the business case they need to more easily gain the support of leadership. 

And that’s no laughing matter.

Bottom Line: Valuable Business Intelligence Tools Benefits for the Compliance World 

Compliance leaders depend on high volumes of data from various sources in the organization. By leveraging the benefits of BI tools to analyze a wider pool of data, they can gain better insights into their security and Compliance readiness, and work more efficiently to achieve their Compliance goals in the long term.

Case Study: Anecdotes + Snowflake

The Snowflake Data Cloud is a global network where thousands of organizations mobilize data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. Inside the Data Cloud, organizations have a single unified view of data so they can easily discover and securely share governed data, and execute diverse analytics workloads. 

The Anecdotes Compliance OS is the leading Compliance automation solution and management platform. It’s also a Snowflake Connected App. Anecdotes is geared to help Compliance professionals continuously collect and map relevant data from dozens of different systems into normalized, credible evidence. It also offers advanced visibility and monitoring capabilities to ensure the best cross-team collaboration. Because anecdotes is built on Snowflake using the connected application model, our joint customers are able to cross-analyze GRC data with other data sets in their own Snowflake Data Cloud, allowing them to build and implement mature Compliance programs that facilitate growth, all while maintaining greater control over their data.

Business Intelligence Tools Benefits GRC

The benefits of using BI tools for GRC teams extend beyond Compliance. BI tools integrate data from various sources, enabling Compliance leaders to gain actionable insights into their organization's security posture. By collaborating with data analysts and leveraging BI tools, GRC teams can identify policy gaps, make predictions, manage risks, and improve overall security. The ability to tap into the organization's data fabric empowers GRC teams to make strategic decisions based on a wider data set, gaining support from leadership and achieving long-term Compliance goals. With BI tools, GRC teams can unlock endless possibilities for growth and success.

"Compliance managers shouldn't have to rely on manual evidence collection and control validation. By partnering with Anecdotes, enterprises can leverage the power of Snowflake to centralize their evidence data, report on actionable insights, and achieve a data-driven approach to Compliance management."

Omer Singer, Head of Cybersecurity Strategy at Snowflake