IT compliance is increasingly complex and multifaceted in an age where digital twins of nearly every facet of life and business proliferate every device we interact with, carry, type on and even talk with. Large and small businesses alike need to ensure compliance, governance, and security are at the core of architectural planning, design, and implementation of their entire data eco-system. Integration technology, at the heart of connectivity between all the end-points in your data topography, must enable compliance.
Ensuring Fitness for Purpose
Foundational to compliance is enabling business to perform its functions and fulfill its obligations. In some cases, this is to enable compliance with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that the business agrees to adhere to or incur penalties (or loss of customers). In other cases, this is integral to service delivery and may be subject to certain types of audits and certifications such as SOC 2 (System and Organization Controls) compliance. Such audits and certifications ensure that overall systems (inclusive of integration) meet various industry standards, state of the art in certain aspects of characteristics such as security, and have appropriate provisions to enable continuity of service delivery.
When selecting among the various available integration technologies in the marketplace, it’s important to stress test your overall information delivery systems (inclusive of candidate integration technologies) to ensure they can functionally and non-functionally scale to meet a few multiples of your most demanding forecasted production volume and veracity needs. Such tests can be time consuming to execute, so gather customer references where the use is of similar to greater production demand to serves as a vendor gating criterion. A good coinciding reference question is to ascertain if there were any special add-on services or additional licensing required to bring the vendor’s product up to the needed performance levels.
Of course, the availability of product logging and audit capabilities are essential. Often overlooked, is how accessible such information is. Is it within reach of your business users or auditors? Or will it require special IT coding to extract and present as a human readable output?
Adeptia Connect uniquely blends an advanced ease-of-use seen only in a select few self-service integration software products with the ability to handle large-scale production volume demands of Fortune 100 companies.
Safeguarding Secrets and Ensuring Privacy
Confidential information needs to remain confidential. Yet the very act of “data integration” which often involves the movement of data through APIs, through files, though message queues, through databases and so on introduces additional points of risk and vulnerability. In addition to typical business needs to keep one’s own trade secrets confidential, most companies are subject to contract terms to keep the trade secrets and transactions of their customers in confidence as well. Of course, companies of all industries are subject to numerous regulations that govern and restrict the management, storage, transmission, and handling of certain kinds of data. Depending on the types of data your business handles, you will be familiar with at least several of these data and information privacy regulations: HIPAA, PCI, GDPR, GLBA, FISMA, CCPA, and others. Many companies also face industry-specific regulations as well.
In just about every integration use case, the state of the art in transmission of data across company boundaries over the internet requires the management of digital encryption certificates to facilitate the protection of data in motion. Further, certain regulations govern how long and where data may persist in a location during the execution of a transaction.
To enable compliance in these areas, you must select and use integration technologies that can enable your appropriate management of trading partner connections, secure transmission of data, auditable deletion of expired data, tracking of transactions, documented escalation of errors and issues into a human workflows, and business user visibility of the end-to-end flow of data that span business processes.
Adeptia Connect provides the capabilities you need to securely transport and manage data with business-user visibility to detect and correct transactional errors earlier in business processes so you can remain complaint quicker and easier with fewer handoffs. When human workflows are needed, Adeptia Connect uniquely provides the collaborative capabilities to bring business users, IT experts, management, and customers together to efficiently resolve issues.
Integration Capabilities that Support Controls and Compliance Requirements
While exchanging and processing files and transactions, you may be subject to compliance within varied regulations. In some cases, you’ll have to aggregate data originating from different technologies, with each originating system having its own security, transaction formats, access methods, and tracking log methods. Putting all of these together to ensure business and regulator compliance can be very challenging and expensive.
The large number of global legal, regulatory and administrative requirements and the variety of standards, guidelines and frameworks require compliance managers to merge and normalize mapping of requirements to controls and other compliance activities. Add to this the growing requirements for compliance within the scope required by business relationships and internally generated mandates, and one can see how the role of the compliance leader has become increasingly daunting.
With requirements coming from multiple sources, the challenge of aggregating, normalizing and designing controls has grown beyond the ability of manual effort, even when supported by spreadsheets and IT integration experts.
The ability to take inputs from a wide range of sources and subsequently feed independent data controls in a simple and easy manner is the foundation for measuring and reporting compliance across regulatory, commercial and organizational frameworks. Adeptia Connect is uniquely equipped with a broad set of data integration functions that can quickly enable to you extract data and measures from a wide set of sources including databases, on-prem systems, cloud applications and storage, spreadsheets, and even third parties, partners, customers, and suppliers. More important, business-users can establish new connections and gain the visibility that once required expert data scientists and expert IT integration consultants.
The Adeptia Team and Toolsets
Adeptia’s operational team is ISO 27001 certified with annual renewals. This means continuing audits have deemed Adeptia’s on-going and systematic examination of information security risks (including threats, vulnerabilities and their potential impact) as well as Adeptia’s suite of information security (and other) controls to address such risks enables Adeptia management to sufficiently control and Adeptia to provide secure and continuous operation of its software and information delivery services.
As one measure of Adeptia’s control system, Adeptia software undergoes continued and periodic penetration testing. We use an enterprise class service provider that monitors open source software that we use and notifies us of any identified security issues and update requirements as available.Similarly, Adeptia’s platform for delivering software updates to customers is hosted in an environment that is penetration tested daily to ensure our code remains clean.
Additionally, all of Adeptia’s development tools are managed by organizations that adhere to industry accepted security standards and are hosted in data centers that are SOC-2 certified.
Summary
The Adeptia Connect approach to secure data integration across your customer and supplier data eco-system facilitates these compliance related benefits:
- Strong business-user driven capability to establish data connections and monitor end-to-end transaction visibility while under IT security and governance controls
- Continuity of secure service delivery through both non-functional product scaling capability and Adeptia team and service delivery
- Improved central data governance
- Data transparency, traceability, and availability
- Early problem detection and resolution by business-users with tracked and facilitated workflows
- Automated recognition of data inconsistencies and issues with notification and escalating workflows
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