IT GovernanceIT Governance, Risk and Compliance Management (GRCM) in One Solution

• Is your IT infrastructure out of control?
• Are you risking fines from license audits?
• Is your IT still operating under its own control?

In today’s competitive market, businesses are increasingly reliant on complex IT technologies and infrastructures. Increased risk, combined with growing compliance pressure has driven a need for better executive visibility and control of IT resources. Adequate policies and processes must be put in place to ensure:

• The link between business and IT strategies is maintained
• IT investments are prioritized on business value
• Risk is mitigated through the proper application of control
• Regulatory compliance is achieved and compliance auditing is supported
• Transparency is balanced with operational efficiency

The assyst solution supports IT Governance, Risk and Compliance Management (GRCM) within a single application to enable business-focused control over IT within the shortest possible timescale.

Maintaining Visibility

Transparency is critical to governing IT in a way that is relevant to the current and future requirements of the business. The IT director must be able to see which IT systems are in place, how they are used and most importantly how they generate value and revenue for the organization. The assyst ITSM solution enables full transparency by linking hardware and software in the physical infrastructure through the logical levels of IT systems, applications, IT services, business processes and revenue-generating business services. This enables governance of IT resources from a business-focused perspective. Executive dashboards provide day-to-day visibility of the status and health of IT services and resources, and historic trend reporting provides a feed for strategic decision making. IT financial information is captured within assyst to give full visibility of the costs and benefits of each IT system or service.

The assyst solution has given Hull City Council complete and accurate visibility of all of its IT and many non-IT assets - an incredible feat for any large organization. Hull City Council - View the full case study

Gaining Control

IT is critical to the ongoing profitability of the majority of large organizations across the globe. Technology must support the current and future needs of the business to remain competitive. The link between business strategy and IT strategy must be established and maintained to ensure IT is driven by business need and IT investment is prioritized on business value. Strategic governance of IT relies on the application of appropriate checks and controls to IT processes, ensuring major strategic decisions are deferred to relevant executives for assessment and authorization before progressing. The assyst solution enables the application of control by enforcing automated escalation points and assignment of strategic decisions and authorizations to nominated executives. The assyst graphical process designer allows process workflows to be easily created or amended to adapt quickly to changing business requirements.

Normally change management is one of the most difficult processes to implement, especially the authorization part. Axios Systems offered flexible workflows for approval of changes. CROC

Mitigating Risk

80% of IT outages are caused by lack of proper control over change, causing major disruptions to staff productivity and notable impact on the profitability of the business. By applying formal change management policies and processes, the risk of negative impact can be mitigated and greater agility can be achieved. The assyst solution minimizes the risk and impact of change through the modeling and automation of change processes, allowing for mandatory impact assessment, approval and authorization tasks. The assyst impact explorer is a visual tool allowing the identification of relationships and dependencies of infrastructure components, systems, IT services, business services and even users who may be affected by a change.

You can see very clearly on the graphical scheme how an incident, a failure or a change will influence IT infrastructure as a whole. CROC

Ensuring Compliance

In response to a number of high-profile accounting scandals, legislation such as Sarbanes Oxley and Basel II were instituted to protect investors and the economy. These requirements enforce disclosure, accountability and the application of checks and controls by placing responsibility on the board of directors to vouch for the completeness and accuracy of financial reporting. As many organization’s financial systems are IT-reliant, responsibility is placed on the IT department to support regulatory compliance and facilitate compliance auditing. The assyst solution provides powerful functionality to allow IT to support compliance and prepare for auditing at minimal cost and with a minimum of resources taken away from core IT activity.

assyst has been developed from inception as an out-of-the-box ITSM solution, fully in line with the recognized ITIL® and ISO 20000 philosophies for service management best practice.

We have unprecedented visibility across the IT infrastructure and the need for laborious and time-consuming manual audits is eradicated. Northgate IS - View the full case study

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