CloseReach
“RISK-OFF” in the Digital Era

In today’s age of “Digital Darwinism,” it’s no longer adequate to have the best product or service and a great business model. Organizations need to be agile, transformative, and compliant to survive and grow in an increasingly complex business, geo-political, and regulatory landscape.

“Going digital” isn’t just a quick add-on solved by adopting leading-edge technologies and industry best practices. It involves changing the workplace culture, modifying the management approach, retraining staff, and overhauling long-used practices, all of which drive business, operational, and regulatory risk to unprecedented levels.

“Although CIOs rely on compliance standards, policies, and processes to mitigate the risk associated with organizational complexities and speed of change, they should enable and embrace a collaborative approach to governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) to break the existing silos,” says Kevin O’Rourke, president of CloseReach.

Since 2004, CloseReach is driven by a mission to de-risk digitalization, business transformation, and organizational change by promoting collaboration, empowering employees, and helping organizations gain a 360-degree view of their enterprise risks. The company transforms these risks and compliance data into actionable business intelligence to support risk-aware decision making. CloseReach’s robust GRC solutions powered by the QualiWare enterprise architecture platform enable a collaborative approach to GRC.

CloseReach’s competitive edge lies in its ability to build risk management solutions that deliver tremendous value to small organizations (less than 50 employees) and large corporations (more than 100,000 employees) alike. The company’s flexible risk management process begins with identifying and defining the risk types that matter most to an organization. This is followed CloseReach documenting the associated activities so the risks can be evaluated and handled efficiently.

CloseReach provides a simple, yet detailed method for scoring risks. After the likelihood and significance of the risks are scored, clients can evaluate how (and if) they should take action. Some risks may be insignificant and not require any remedial plan of action. The last step is to monitor the effect of the plan, ensuring clients get the desired outcome.

“Our solution ensures that clients can access different sources and develop a mindset for continuous risk to support their future growth,” says O’Rourke. “That's really the strength of what we do from a corporate experience and technology perspective.”

Our solution ensures that clients can access different sources and develop a mindset for continuous risk handling to support their future growth

To serve a fragmented market where organizations manage compliance and risk using spreadsheets, word documents, and PowerPoint, CloseReach has built a Compliance Management Accelerator. The tool supports many industry standards, including ISO 9001, 27001, and GDPR, allowing clients to accelerate implementation with predefined best practices, ready-to-use automated workflows, and management dashboards.

CloseReach has tested the Compliance Management Accelerator in its ecosystem to demonstrate the tool’s operational efficiency in an organizational setting. The solution helped the company seamlessly comply with ISO 9001 standards and complete the registration in less than four months.

Risk management is expanding beyond typical certification and regulatory or financial compliance. Risk profiles now encompass personal data protection, brand protection, manufacturing efficiency and quality, supply chain integrity, and vendor and partner relationships and many organizations struggle with full integration of risk with full-on business transformation and cultural change. CloseReach is set to help organizations wade effectively through these challenges.