One of the significant challenges facing organizations today is the ability to respond effectively to the demands of regulators and standards bodies. This can represent a considerable burden for many, diverting time and resources away from other strategic activities.
Regulatory compliance is a critical element of enterprise risk management. Organizations that fail to meet regulatory requirements face severe legal, financial, and reputational consequences, which can threaten their operations and business continuity.
The impacts include:
Resource Diversion: Significant time and resources must be allocated to compliance activities, often at the expense of other strategic initiatives.
Operational Disruption: Non-compliance can lead to fines, penalties, business interruptions, and even loss of licenses.
Reputational Risk: Failure to comply can damage trust with customers, partners, and investors, leading to loss of business and diminished market position.
Business Process Improvement: On the positive side, regulatory compliance can drive organizations to streamline internal processes, improve data management, and enhance overall operational efficiency.
Risk Mitigation: Compliance programs help organizations proactively identify, assess, and mitigate risks, reducing the likelihood of costly incidents or breaches.
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What is the Purpose of Ardoq’s Regulation Compliance Solution?
Ardoq’s Compliance Assurance solution enables organizations to proactively manage compliance and associated risks by leveraging interconnected frameworks, policies, and risk management practices. The solution delivers value to business leaders by identifying actionable insights based on data relevant to the current state of compliance within the organization, and provides straightforward, data-driven methods for monitoring compliance, managing documentation, and effectively mitigating risks.
Key Ways Ardoq Supports Regulatory Compliance:
Centralized Compliance Management: Ardoq provides a centralized hub for mapping requirements across multiple regulations, eliminating redundancy and simplifying the management of overlapping requirements.
Structured, Evidence-Based Approach: Regulatory requirements, risks, and controls are modeled in dedicated workspaces, creating clear traceability from obligations to mitigations and enabling confident audit preparation.
Automated Risk Assessment and Reporting: Ardoq automates risk calculations (likelihood, impact, exposure), evidence collection, and reporting, reducing manual effort and ensuring real-time visibility into compliance posture.
Continuous Monitoring and Alerts: Real-time alerts notify stakeholders of compliance gaps or outdated controls, supporting proactive remediation and minimizing the risk of violations.
Audit-Ready Documentation: All compliance-related documentation, policies, and evidence are organized in one place, streamlining audit processes and reducing last-minute scrambles.
Collaboration and Accountability: Role-based access, automated workflows, and survey tools enable teams to collaborate efficiently, assign ownership, and maintain up-to-date compliance records.
Framework Integration: Ardoq’s metamodel links compliance requirements to internal controls and risk registers, supporting comprehensive governance, risk, and compliance management.
Customizable and Scalable: The solution is framework-agnostic, supporting both standard and custom compliance regimes, and can be tailored to industry-specific or organizational needs.
Scope
Ardoq’s Regulatory Compliance solution assists organizations with understanding how they meet regulatory requirements for a specific regulation. If an organization wants to go further, the solution can be easily extended through leveraging assessments, as outlined in the Architecture Records solution, and further combined with enterprise architecture components (e.g., applications, technologies, roles, and capabilities).
However, this document does not directly address this second scenario and focuses on the generic implementation of a Regulation and its relationship to a Compliance Framework or internal control library. Ardoq enables organizations to stay agile and resilient when addressing regulatory challenges.
Ardoq's Governance Risk and Compliance Use Case methodology is framework-agnostic and supports the implementation of various regulatory standards and frameworks. This allows for flexibility when implementing a framework that is unique to your organization.
Some of the questions addressed by Regulatory Compliance include:
Regulation Compliance |
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Governance |
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Documentation Management
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Rationale
Ardoq has developed this solution leveraging the framework introduced in compliance assurance. Similarly, the Regulation Requirement is the context focus. Focusing on the Requirement allows organizations to create and understand relationships, measure the adherence to a given regulation through the implementation and effectiveness of compliance frameworks, standards, and internal control libraries. This approach is consistent with our Compliance Assurance solution and easily extends into Ardoq’s Application Risk Management solution.
Key Components of Regulation Compliance
The Regulation Compliance solution leverages interconnected components across key workspaces: Regulations, Frameworks, Policies, Controls, and optionally Assessments. These components work together to facilitate robust compliance management.
Where to Use It?
The Regulatory Compliance solution enables Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), Compliance Officers, and Enterprise Architects to import requirements from a relevant Regulation. It allows these business partners to create or map to existing control frameworks, standards, processes, and internal controls, which can later be deployed to mitigate risks in the risk register.
Requirement (Regulation Workspace)
Each Regulation should be modeled in its own workspace to simplify traceability and auditing. These workspaces may reference respective regulation requirements and can be realized by assessment components, frameworks, standards, or a shared internal control library.
The Regulation Workspace is a central repository for all identified requirements. Each requirement represents an obligation the organization needs to address or to justify its exclusion.
Requirement
Requirements are specific rules or standards that must be followed to ensure lawful operation within a particular sector.
References
Requirements are linked to framework requirements, assessments and controls using the 'Is Realized By' reference type.
Requirement (Frameworks Workspace)
Frameworks, such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, and internal organizational Policies are represented in the same way as Information Artifacts that may be broken down into a more detailed collection of Requirements. These can be used to address (through realization) the requirements of a given regulation. The requirements may be linked directly to internal controls, indicating which controls are realizations of the requirements of adopted frameworks that corporate policies or internal controls can address.
Individual framework workspaces represent standards and frameworks that guide compliance efforts. Each Requirement component details specific requirements derived from frameworks (e.g., ISO 27001, NIST Cybersecurity Framework).
The Frameworks Workspace is composed of three component types:
Requirement Category - The Category component type is used to organize in a categorized hierarchy according to the framework (NIST, SOC2, ISO27001, etc.). This may be of arbitrary depth, with the leaf nodes being the component type organized in the hierarchy.
Information Artifact - In this context, the Information Artefact component type represents different security frameworks (ex. SOC2, ISO27001, CCM, NIST, etc). The Information Artefact, in the context of a policy, represents an existing policy within your organization.
Requirement - In this context, the Requirement component type represents the specific requirements from the framework (ex. EU DORA, a requirement of A.5.1.1 - Policies for information security)
Key fields include:
ISMS Applicability Field: This field captures whether a requirement is relevant to the organization’s Information Systems Management System (SMS), ensuring alignment with security objectives.
Justification Field: Documents the rationale for including or excluding a requirement, aiding decision-making and audit preparation.
Is Implemented Field: Tracks whether the requirement has been addressed through specific controls or other measures.
Requirements are linked to controls using references such as:
Realized By: Connects requirements to the controls that fulfill them.
Mitigates: Links controls to the risks they address.
Impacts: Indicates which applications or systems are affected by the requirements.
Each Framework should be modeled in its own workspace. These workspaces can often reference each other, but, depending on how you have implemented frameworks, controls, and policies within your organization, they primarily have a direct relationship to an internal control library.
Control Component Type (Controls Workspace)
The Control Workspace contains all controls implemented to mitigate risks and ensure compliance with policies or frameworks. Each Control component captures detailed information about the control’s purpose and implementation status.
Organizations can:
Define controls that address specific risks, such as technical measures (e.g., encryption) or organizational measures (e.g., training programs).
Establish linkages between controls and associated risks using the Mitigates reference type.
Ensure clarity by specifying how each control is implemented (e.g., policies, processes, or technologies).
Monitor the effectiveness of controls in reducing risk exposure and achieving compliance objectives.
Compliance Assessment Workspace (optional)
This captures the results of an assessment determining whether a particular subject component complies with a specific requirement. The requirement might, for example, be a policy or regulatory requirement, such as DORA or GDPR compliance, or a collection of requirements that collectively describe a framework, such as an organization’s architecture guiding principles. If modeled in Ardoq, they may be associated with the Assessment component with the Refers To reference.
The implementation is consistent with the guidance outlined in the Architecture Records guide, with fields specific to the type of assessment being carried out.