Internal auditors play the critical role of being the third line of defense. When risk owners and management do not identify risk or adequately mitigate the risk, it is imperative for the internal auditors to provide independent and objective insight on risk. The audit management solutions market caters to this need by automating internal audit operations through its primary and secondary offerings. Audit management solutions help manage the complexity of the auditor's role, not the organization's risk.
Corporate Compliance and Oversight (CCO) tools provide the framework and support for standardization of compliance activities and automation to increase efficiency and effectiveness of compliance management programs. CCO enables a common cross-enterprise approach to IT compliance activities that most affect the regulatory oversight of corporate governance. This is done through support of the five major requirements for managing a compliance program: policy development, aggregation and normalization, control monitoring, workflow management, and case management.
The GRC for assurance leaders solutions market offers technologies that support identifying, assessing, managing, monitoring and reporting on risks associated with the enterprise and compliance risks assurance leaders manage. These solutions commonly include tools for tracking workflow associated with these activities and their related aggregate data. Solutions in this market also support wide varieties of risk domains and niche workflows of risk managers or owners throughout the enterprise. Vendors’ products included in this research offer at least one capability in all core risk management capabilities and a module or solution package to support more than one risk domain. They are designed to facilitate coordination throughout the “three lines of defense” by providing a synthesized view of assurance activity and data to second-line functions — especially enterprise risk management (ERM) and compliance.
Gartner defines Integrated risk management (IRM) as the combined technology, processes and data that serves to fulfill the objective of enabling the simplification, automation and integration of strategic, operational and IT risk management across an organization.