Why Enterprise Automation Is So Important for Compliance

The cost of maintaining regulatory compliance has skyrocketed for companies in all industries over the last two decades, according to a study conducted by the Ponemon Institute and Globalscape. The figures are eye-opening:

• Average total cost of $5.5 million annually
• More than 1.3% of total wage costs for the average US company

And if those numbers have not caught your attention yet, the Ponemon Institute-Globalscape study also revealed that the average cost of a non-compliance event has grown to nearly $15 million! So in essence, the cost of being compliant is on average almost three times less expensive than the cost of being non-compliant.

Why understanding regulatory compliance is important for IT professionals

IT teams need to pay particularly close attention to maintaining regulatory compliance. Business process automation can deliver numerous benefits, including:

• Pure productivity improvements
• Visibility
• Failures and obvious positive impacts
• Overall uptime

However, these positives can also make it easy to disregard potential compliance implications. This can be a costly mistake, especially when the processes targeted are in-scope for compliance audits. These jobs will typically be in relation to invoicing, managing customer orders, or similar bottom-line impacting applications.

As an example of why regulatory compliance is important for IT professionals, Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX-404) mandates that all public companies are required to establish Internal Controls and Procedures for Financial Reporting, with the core scope encompassing:

• Document
• Test
• Maintain
• Control

The Broadcom portfolio of Automation Solutions provides a reliable repository to support the Test, Maintain, and Control portions of SOX-404.

The risk of ongoing digital transformation and faster cloud adoption

The wave of digital transformation has helped drive faster cloud adoption and hybrid cloud complexity. Beyond both real and perceived cost reductions, key justifications to transition to the cloud involve:

• Data governance and sovereignty requirements
• Enablement of disaster recovery capabilities across time zones, as well as maintenance window flexibility based on customers’ expectations

Focusing on those perfectly valid benefits will be natural, and an open-source scheduler included by a cloud provider could provide an IT team an easy solution. Unfortunately, making that “easy” choice would cause that team to fail a SOX-404 Quarterly Audit because they would not be able to demonstrate Change Control evidence to the Auditor.

The solution: Enterprise Workload Automation

Broadcom’s Enterprise Workload Automation solutions help mitigate regulatory compliance risk created by siloed, cloud-native scheduling solutions by providing:

• An ecosystem that moves away from “islands of automation” and into unified observability of automation across the enterprise, whether on the mainframe and distributed applications or in the cloud.
• One interface for which you control your own upgrade sequences and tie them to your internal change control process.
• One workload orchestration interface that enables both monolithic and microservices infrastructure to coexist whether the jobs are On-Prem, in the cloud, or hybrid platform, significantly helping reduce the auditable footprint.
• The ability to manage SLAs for each job, linked with its related Standard Operating Procedure and the logs required to show auditors evidence of actions taken for jobs that did not complete.

Conclusion

Automation by Broadcom can help you navigate your digital transformation journey while making sure you continue to meet ever-growing compliance requirements. Our solutions provide you with a lasting ecosystem capable of handling both the old and the new, all without compromising on performance.