A compliance manager plays a critical role in ensuring that an organization adheres to legal, regulatory, and internal policy standards. Their primary responsibility is to oversee and manage compliance programs, reducing the risk of legal, ethical and cyber security violations.

In this interview Samu Nisula, a compliance manager for a global company with +50k employees, shares his view on how EMERALD workflow could reduce costs and accelerate compliance.

Compliance Manager is one of the user roles available in EMERALD and EMERALD UI mockup was used to gather information and feedback for development.

Typical workflow for running compliance program consists of 5 phases from “Preparation” to “Reporting”. Phases from Monitoring (Phase 2) to Reporting (phase 5) are repeated and such are prime target for automation and efficiency boost that EMERALD can provide. Phase 1 is required to be rerun when environmental requirements change.

Samu highlights that “running phases 2 to 5 is nowadays manual work that requires a lot of effort, automation of this process would be highly appreciated and can also improve the quality”

With Emerald compliance manager can migrate from excel based tools to EMERALD assisted compliance manager workflow. As expected, working with reporting tools and excels is monthly burden also for Samu. “I spend 2-3 days every month to compile all the reports required”.

One of the features highlighted in the UI walkthrough was two-dimensional context diagram AKA “certification graph”. This graph could be used to define the compliance scope and provide additional visibility. Samu sees this feature interesting, but “in our case the technical set up is not so critical, but I can see this use case valuable for other customers”

In the heart of EMERALD there is the continuous compliance management with illustrative dashboards. During UI demonstration the compliance dashboard was presented and Samu was positively impressed: “The compliance summary page was indeed quite illustrative to report compliance status to the executives”.

Compliance Manager runs process which sole aim to produce deviations from the baseline compliance. Deviations in EMERALD are highlighted as Non Compliance to a certain Control. Each deviation can be drilled down to individual metric that has failed due to unexpected change in the cloud environment. Samu sees potential challenge in this for the deployment “Migrating existing manual metrics to the EMERALD tool must be a challenge, if the rules has to be tailored for each environment”. How EMERALD will support this will be interesting to see in the first pilot installations expected to be ready in mid 2025.

EMARALD is designed to support compliance managers workflow and Samu was happy to provide his input and he is looking forward to see the actual tool in operation.

“Good luck for the last mile in the project!” says Samu and gives a thumb up for EMERALD!!