Quote: We’re enabling organizations to protect their biggest asset in a digital world – data.
An unexpected surge in business complexity and uncertainty in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis has underscored the crucial role of a holistic and integrated risk management. Yet, companies tend to primarily focus their risk management initiatives on regulatory compliance and financial controls. With global trade, financial markets and supply chains being inextricably linked to each other, risks can arise unexpectedly from several multiple sources, significantly impacting companies. Stronger control over a wide array of internal and external risks – be it market, strategic, financial, operational, IT, legal, and brand or reputation related risks is hence crucial for business survival. Especially, in the light of growing stakeholder and top management demands for sophisticated risk assessment capabilities.
A top priority at corporations today is to gain visibility into and control over the multitude of internal and external risks. A recent increase in regulatory mandates and active shareholders has made many organizations sensitized to identifying areas of risk in their business -be it financial, operational, IT, brand, or reputation related risk. No longer is risk management considered the sole responsibility of specialists. Executives and Boards want visibility into risk exposure and status so that they can effectively manage the organization’s long-term strategies. In response, companies are looking to systemically identify, measure, prioritize, and respond to all business risks, and then manage any exposure accordingly.
MetricStream provides an integrated and flexible framework for documenting and assessing risks, defining controls, managing audits, identifying issues and implementing remediation plans. The risk management solution provides advanced capabilities such as risk calculators and risk heat maps for risk analysis and monitoring. MetricStream uniquely combines software and content to deliver the risk management software solution to customers. Embedded best practices help define the scope of processes and sub-processes for risk management. It also guides the development of control and test libraries. The solution provides other intelligent and content-driven features such as access to training content from an expert community, and integration of business processes with regulatory notifications and industry alerts.
Managing Today’s Risk
Led by technology visionaries and software executives, MetricStream’s leadership team brings together some of the best and brightest minds in GRC, enterprise software, mobility, cloud services, and artificial intelligence.
The risk management solution being provided by the organization offers increased shareholder value as good corporate governance translates to better brand and reputation, resulting in stock price premiums. They also give optimized risk/return outcomes for greater transparency and visibility provided by the solution enables the Management to undertake initiatives with the most optimal risk/reward outcomes. Initiatives with a higher risk can be monitored and managed closer and there is the benefit of reduced compliance costs, integrated corporate governance, risk management, and compliance processes lead to significantly lower compliance and governance costs. It also offers improved business performance, robust risk management and internal controls strengthen operations and business performance.
In today’s ever-evolving business landscape where new risks continue to emerge even as existing risks grow more complex, the need for a strong risk management program is crucial. Organizations need to be well-prepared to manage both current and emerging risks across geopolitical, digital, strategic, third-party, cybersecurity, and compliance areas. A lack of clear visibility into these risks and their potential impact can hinder decision-making, and negatively impact business performance. As a result, many organizations across industries are adopting an integrated approach to risk management across their business units and extended vendor network. This cohesive approach enables stakeholders to effectively coordinate and unify risk management activities across all business functions while aligning their assurance programs, and gaining comprehensive visibility into both risk exposure and relationships.
Managing risk from an integrated perspective enables consistent, unified assessments. It provides a better understanding of risk profiles which, in turn, supports informed, risk-based decision-making. It also helps organizations decide on their risk appetite, establish their decision metrics, and align their strategy across all the three lines of defense. MetricStream provides a complete portfolio of GRC solutions that enable organizations to build a holistic, collaborative, and highly efficient approach to GRC. Their solutions are leveraged by organizations across industries to make the shift from inefficient siloes of compliance activities and risk data, towards cohesive and tightly mapped GRC programs.
Through their solutions, organizations gain the visibility they need to effectively manage a wide range of business and IT risks, while strengthening compliance with multiple regulations, policies, and standards. Advanced analytics, real-time reports, regulatory notifications, and other key capabilities enable organizations to minimize business liabilities and optimize opportunities for success.
Integrated Risk Management Solution
The MetricStream Integrated Risk Management Solution provides a single, unified system to identify, assess, manage, and mitigate various types of risks, including strategic, operational, IT, third-party, and compliance risks. The solution cuts across organizational silos, standardizing risk and control taxonomies. It also supports control testing, as well as risk monitoring, mitigation, and reporting in a consistent and aligned manner.
The underlying platform helps organizations implement an integrated, flexible risk data model and process architecture to strengthen coordination and collaboration across risk, compliance, assurance, and business functions (comprising the three lines of defense). This cohesive approach facilitates a common understanding of enterprise risk exposure while helping users enhance the completeness, accuracy, and integrity of risk data.
The solution also supports the data contextualization needs of various organizational lines. Stakeholders can assess risks and control effectiveness from multiple perspectives, and drive their individual governance areas, while aggregating risk outcomes to provide a single view of the inherent and residual risk exposure at various levels of the organizational hierarchy.
Enterprise Risk Management App
Today’s dynamic business landscape is replete with a multitude of internal and external risks, making risk mitigation a key element in propelling business growth. Enterprises need simple and effective ways to detect, evaluate, and mitigate risks while ensuring that risk management programs are pervasive across the organization.
The MetricStream Enterprise Risk Management App enables a structured and systematic approach towards managing organizational risks. By supporting uniform risk assessment methodologies and standards, the app provides an accurate understanding of risks across the organization and clear visibility into the top risks. Multi-dimensional risk assessments based on several qualitative and quantitative parameters can be performed to establish the organization’s risk profile. Real-time insights into risk management programs are offered through powerful analytics, advanced heat maps, reports, dashboards, and charts.
Companies can identify and define business objectives, processes, products, risks, and controls, and establish and maintain relationships across these data elements. Document and manage a wide array of enterprise risks and associated details such as risk description, category, hierarchy, and ownership using a centralized library and risk framework. The firms can also get access to advanced tools for planning, scheduling, and performing risk assessments, and once the assessments are complete, route the results for review and approval. Perform assessments easily with a simple and intuitive user interface. This enables both top-down and bottom-up approaches to risk assessments and manage simple assessments by rating a risk, or advanced assessments using multiple factors and advanced risk scoring to meet variations in the risk assessment methodology across business units, regions, and products. Users can add or delete risks and controls on the fly while performing an assessment, and also, assess the overall control environment based on multiple factors.
The clients are able to define the logic for computing inherent and residual risk scores, and analyze them through heat maps and aggregate the scores based on averages, worst-case scenarios (maximum), or best-case scenarios (minimum). Roll up the scores to an assessed organization, objective, product, or process. They can also define controls as per industry standard frameworks like COSO and COBIT, design control test plans and assessments, and rate the operational and design effectiveness of the controls, leveraging questionnaires and surveys as required. Understand the control evaluation status, and analyze the results using interactive dashboards.
The Future Ahead
Through the Integrated Risk Management Solution organizations can also measure and track key indicators for risks (KRIs), controls (KCIs), and performance (KPIs). This will enable them to set thresholds to identify potential threats, and mitigate them in advance, send alerts and notifications on any breach to relevant personnel for faster decision-making. Thorough the solution users can access the record findings stemming from risk assessments and control tests. The solution also recommends action plans such as control modification or definition of new controls as part of the issue remediation process, and monitor the status of implemented actions at every stage, and track them to closure.
The solution also gives users access to real-time information on risk management programs across the organization through role-based landing pages with dashboards. The users are able to view risks by the organization, product, process, or risk category and slice and dice the data using easy filters, and track the movement of risk from inherent to residual on a heat map based on the effectiveness of the controls. The organizations can gain a 360º view of their program through advanced visualization of key metrics, and personalize their home page based on the company’s specific analysis needs.
“Our solutions are enabling banking and financial institutions to safeguard and add value to their customers’ investments. We help healthcare companies to save lives and treat patients in the comfort of their homes. We’re supporting air services companies keep travelers safe, on time, and comfortable. We’re enabling organizations to protect their biggest asset in a digital world – data,” states Mikael Hagstroem, President and CEO of MetricStream. Through their enterprise platform and cloud software, MetricStream enables enterprises across industries to drive exceptional business performance based on a foundation of good governance, trust, and integrity.
