With Aurex, Continuous Controls Monitoring Shall Never be the Same Again

The objective of Continuous Auditing has always been to shine a torchlight, to provide a greater degree of transparency into enterprise operations.

This involves automated collection or tracking of Audit evidence and indicators by internal or external auditors from an enterprise's IT Systems, Processes, Transactions, Controls and the like on a Continuous basis. It invariably enhances Auditor capabilities and enables to ensure compliance with policies, procedures, and regulations.

Continuous Controls Monitoring is a subset of Continuous Auditing. Gartner defines Continuous Controls Monitoring in the following terms: Continuous controls monitoring (CCM) is a set of technologies to reduce business losses through continuous monitoring and reducing the cost of audits through continuous auditing of the controls in financial and other transactional applications.

One of the central features of Aurex is to run the controls environment in sync with the risk dynamics in real-time and to enable enterprises to thrive on opportunities. An instance of throwback is not unwarranted here.

In legacy systems, unlike Aurex, CCM came with a set of challenges:

• Multiple sources of disparate data
• Inability to arrive at a solid business case for a CCM solution investment
• Validation of CCM effectiveness

The traditional solution to disparate data systems in CCM was to carry out resource mobilization to understand and make sense of the data from varied sources and store it in a common place with access controls. This removed the redundancies for easy reporting. But this was time and effort intensive in real.

There was also this challenge of an inability to build a solid business case for a CCM solution investment. The legacy solution was to create an exhaustive plan with requirements and scope added in. This is followed by key stakeholder identification and confidence building amongst them to fructify the plan.

With regard to the validation of CCM effectiveness, the solution employed in the past years was to ensure three lines of defense -- operations personnel, management and auditors-- vouch for the accuracy and completeness of the solution. But this too came with a host of problems, including complexity, dissonance, and confusion.

Enter Aurex

To address challenge number 1, Aurex brings disparate data from ERPs, CRMs etc., to one place at the click of a few buttons and with phenomenal ease.

Aurex is a unique plug-and-play ecosystem that gives clients a greater degree of assurance over their complex, multifaceted organization by employing its Audit & Analytics capabilities. The purpose of Aurex is to identify the organizational risks proactively and in real-time and report to the Board and the Management the multitude of risks to mitigate the same. It does this by demolishing organizational silos, thereby ensuring that decision makers get the right data at the right time to make better decisions. It automates end-to-end workflows. And facilitates clients to stay audit-ready, always.

Aurex has got a modular architecture with a subscription service maintaining cost leadership. This means that building a business value proposition for a CCM solution investment works hands down in the case of an enterprise if Aurex is involved.

Aurex also empowers clients with easy validation as a 360-degree view of risk, audit, compliance, and governance spectrums enabling stakeholders with stakeholder-specific dashboards, making it easy on their part to keep tabs on enterprise matters.

The case for continuous audit is a profound one.

It provides a slew of benefits to organizations which means audits of this nature are gaining a greater degree of prominence in the auditing sphere, thanks to Aurex. An upgraded frequency in the use of data and analysis at the right time enhances not only the quality of audit but also the thoroughness of internal controls, decreasing or bringing down by a huge margin a company's compliance risk. In fact, the automation of audit procedures has saved time and freed up greater resources like human resources, which could be utilized optimally in other areas.

Unlike the traditional reactive way of working, Aurex implements a proactive model of work with real-time analytics and integration of disparate applications.

Manage risk, audit, and compliance with enhanced efficacy in real time, plug revenue leakages and the possibility of contracting regulatory fines.