Introducing Ardoq’s New Application Risk Management Solution

• Why Ardoq’s Application Risk Solution?
• Benefits of the Solution
• Key components included in the Solution

Why Ardoq’s Application Risk Solution?

Maintaining IT risk and compliance is complex, challenging, and time-consuming. Many people are involved in risk management and will have differing perspectives on what risks are acceptable, which should be reduced, and whether controls are being applied appropriately. 

Organizations commonly struggle to implement and maintain proper risk management practices across their software estate, leading to uncertainty and a lack of financial, legal, and operational control.

To address this challenge, Ardoq now offers a smart and effective set of tools for identifying and managing application risk as part of its software platform. Ardoq’s Application Risk Solution has been designed and developed based on research and expertise in risk, security, and Enterprise Architecture.

Instead of complicated and drawn-out application risk assessments, Ardoq removes friction from the usually tedious process. It makes it easy to evaluate risk levels and generate insightful reports for everyone interested in ensuring that risk mitigation efforts protect critical business capabilities, and achieve IT compliance.

“Application risk, security, and compliance is an increasing worry for IT leaders and an area that is complex and resource-intensive. The pressure to stay ahead of potential threats, implement adequate controls, and comply with policies, frameworks, and regulatory requirements is increasing. 

Our goal with this solution is to simplify application risk management and enable our customers to have a unified view of risks, controls, and mitigation efforts across the organization.” 
- Jason Baragry, Chief Enterprise Architect at Ardoq 

For organizations already using Ardoq, this new Solution enables them to get even greater value from the platform.

Key questions you can answer with Ardoq are:

• What are the company’s top risks to applications?
• How severe is their impact?
• What is the likelihood of the risk occurring?
• Which applications have too high threat levels?
• Who in the organization owns the risk?
• What risks should we care about?
• When was the risk level last evaluated?
• Who in the organization will be impacted if there is an incident?
• Which teams, departments, or business units carry the most risk?
• Which business and technical capabilities carry the most risk?
• What controls are being applied to mitigate risk?
• What is the control effectiveness?
• Where are there control deficiencies?
• What initiatives are we prioritizing to reduce IT risk levels? 

These are just some of the questions Ardoq’s new Application Risk solution will help answer faster and more easily.

The Top 7 Benefits of Ardoq’s Application Risk Management Solution

Ardoq’s Application Risk Solution makes it easier for Enterprise Architects, CISOs, IT leaders, Risk and Security teams, and other professionals to maintain effective IT risk governance. 

Compared to other tools, Ardoq enables you to prioritize risk investments based on quantifiable metrics and protect your business from threats, failures, and breaches.

Benefits include:

1. Fewer spreadsheets or siloed information—Centralize more data, eliminate messy spreadsheets, and expand your use of Ardoq to include a risk register and control library and maintain up-to-date information that can easily be shared with key audiences.

2. Shorter, easier risk assessments with clearer risk visibility—Following our best practice guide, you can quickly gather data about the probability of risks and their impact, automate scoring, and ensure the risk register is regularly reviewed, maintained, and kept up to date by the relevant risk owners.

3. A sharper focus on risk identification and mitigation—Applications change throughout their lifecycle, and so do risks. Ardoq enables you to gather information and send alerts to app owners, risk owners, and project owners when there is a change in risk levels, controls, or plans.

4. Automated reporting and presentations—Ardoq pre-populates reports, dashboards, and pre-made visualizations, saving you hours of work. You can adjust the reports to fit various requirements and provide application owners with their own risk dashboard.  

5. Improved metrics tracking—In addition to tracking application metrics through Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Ardoq’s Application Risk Solution now includes metrics such as :

• Number of applications at risk
• Inherent and residual risk values and trends
• Number of applications without owners
• Number of applications over risk threshold
• Number of applications requiring remediation
• Risks impacting critical business capabilities and processes
• Total active controls
• Control implementation trendline
• Risk remediation status
• Percentage of framework requirements satisfied (e.g., NIST Cybersecurity Framework)

6. IT and Business Collaboration—People from IT, Security, or Enterprise Risk and Compliance see risk from different angles and may not agree on which risks pose the greatest threat. Ardoq helps you build relationships with risk owners by gathering feedback through surveys and sharing key risk metrics and reports based on the same data with the wider organization. Ardoq administrators manage user access to ensure the right people see what’s appropriate for their roles. Risk and control data, for example, can be separated and viewed only by authorized users. 

7. Align to Regulatory Compliance and Internal Controls—Identify how internal control frameworks, corporate policies, and regulatory or industry standards (e.g., ISO 27000, NIST) are applied to applications and where there are gaps.

In short, Ardoq’s Application Risk Solution puts risk into a system so everyone can feel confident the business has complete visibility and control of risk, compliance, and mitigation efforts.

Above: An example of how Ardoq keeps pertinent information organized, searchable, and secure in its risk register. Ardoq also includes application registers, control libraries, and other data neatly structured in a database.

Above: Ardoq includes surveys and workflows for easily capturing, evaluating, and reporting application risk levels and related controls. 

Above: Visual charts enable risk managers and owners to quickly identify the “red” areas of greatest concern.

Above: Dashboards guide risk and compliance teams to make the right decisions about risk management.

Above: One of many automatically generated reports that help IT, risk, and security teams understand what applications have the greatest exposure, how controls are being applied, and the effectiveness of mitigation plans.

What Does the Solution Include?

The Application Risk Solution is an addition to Ardoq’s other Solutions, which include Application Lifecycle Management, Application Hosting, and Business Capability Modeling.

Each Solution is extensively researched by experts and based on best practices. Applying Solutions enables you to save time and produce insights faster for key stakeholders, modifying the assets to fit your organization.

See also: What Are Ardoq’s Use Case Guides and Who Can Use Them?

The Solution includes:

• Step-by-step guide
• Sample data and application risk management metamodel
• Easy spreadsheets import
• Application library, risk register, and control library
• Automated risk scoring, including residual risk and inherent risk values
• Pre-designed surveys to simplify risk assessments, involve application owners or risk owners, and maintain up-to-date information
• Workflows to remind application owners, project owners, or others about unmitigated risks or actions needed
• Variety of reports and visualizations, including dependency maps, reports, and dashboards for key stakeholders
• Ardoq Discover—A self-service portal that enables you to securely share insights with IT leaders, risk and security teams, and other colleagues

Want to learn more?
Contact your Customer Success Manager or book a demo with our sales representatives.