Most CEOs and corporate leaders would say that a core mission of any company is to maximize shareholder value and/or protect the company’s assets. With nearly every “document” in the world being created on a computer today and a company’s information clearly being one if it’s assets, why wouldn’t information governance or, as they say in corporate legal circles, compliance, figure more prominently in every company’s risk management portfolio?
Managing risks to an organization means assessing what could go wrong at any stage of its operations. It’s not quite like managing risk on an individual project because the potential harm from compliance risks can originate from many sources and the scope of the damage can be more impactful. The point is that companies today need to not only proactively manage how they create, store, secure and dispose of information, but they need to assess their compliance obligations in light of the new realities of the complex, data-driven world we now live in.
Legal and compliance risks can originate internally or externally and some are more pronounced than others. Obviously, if your organizations is sued, whether you see it coming or not, you’re put on notice to take steps to comply with discovery obligations. But what about the compliance risks that are not anticipated, a data breach or a rogue actor within an organization? How does an organization plan for that?
Fortunately, there are solutions today that can give corporate leaders insight into the data on their systems –tools that are quiet adept at identifying bad actors (and actions) and the havoc they might impose on an organization. Machine learning, data insight tools, data loss protection solutions –all of these and more are part of the compliance risk managers toolkit.
Organizations that are serious about their compliance obligations and about protecting the arguably most important asset of any company –their information—would be well-served to look into these tools and begin taking the proactive steps necessary to protect their organization’s overall health and well-being.
If you would like a free consultation about what you might do to protect your organization, reach out to eDPM Advisory Services today.
