Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM) involves using technology to automatically and frequently monitor controls to validate their effectiveness in mitigating risk and ensuring business continuity, compliance, and security. CCM has applications across industries for fraud monitoring, quality control, and security controls. Organizations can implement CCM by configuring operating systems or using a compliance operations platform to centrally manage controls across the enterprise. CCM improves risk management by providing enhanced visibility into control effectiveness.

1. What is Continuous Controls Monitoring?
Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM) is defined as applying technology to allow continuous (or at least high-frequency), automated monitoring of controls to validate the effectiveness
of controls designed to mitigate risk, including maintaining an active cyber defense posture and ensuring business continuity and regulatory compliance.
CCM has many use cases across industries. It exists in Financial Services as fraud monitoring and financial transaction monitoring. It’s utilized in Manufacturing for quality and process
control monitoring. Across industries, organizations are starting to deploy CCM over key control processes around network and data security.
There are a couple of different approaches to CCM implementation. It can be as simple as turning on certain settings in the source operating system and using its built-in dashboards and
reports.
To have a more comprehensive CCM system in place that monitors a wide range of controls across business domains, an organization needs a single repository that documents and
manages its controls and gathers evidence of their effectiveness. This type of system, commonly known as a compliance operations platform, is built to test and monitor controls at
scale. A compliance operations platform has connectors to common business applications across IT, Development, Security, HR, Sales, and Finance – and can pull relevant data about
many types of controls into its platform for streamlined controls assessment/validation.
All in all, CCM is a key aspect of Governance, Risk and Compliance that helps an enterprise improve its overall risk management.
Continuous Control Monitoring Radar
Benefits
Enhanced Accuracy: “Right the first time”— demonstrates the proportion of transactions that adhered to expected process and
tolerances…so you can focus on understanding and reducing anomalies.
Collaboration: You can increase trust and transparency across lines of defense through centralized dashboards and extractable
insight content.
Integration: CCM can help your organization connect and synthesize risk and control data from multiple platforms across the
enterprise
Reduce Costs: CCM can help your organization reduce costs, by reducing human capital effort on low-value testing, transferring risk
resolution to first line management, and highlighting process deviations for investigation

2. The Benefits of Implementing Continuous Controls Monitoring
• Organizations that deploy CCM enjoy numerous benefits, such as:
• Increased productivity of compliance/internal audit teams:
• These highly skilled employees are able to test more controls within a given timeframe so they’re more likely to catch issues before they develop into problems.
• These teams can do more impactful work and focus their time on strategic efforts such as including evaluating controls that require manual testing.
• Confidence that line managers and employees who operate the technologies that run key business processes are actively managing the risks that come with these
processes. Examples include:
• A senior engineer should always review new code before it gets deployed into the production environment.
• The admin for the company’s single sign-on system should remove any terminated employee from access within seven days of termination.
• A network security engineer needs to know that the application firewall is always on; if it isn’t, they need to fix it right away.
• A Chief Security Officer needs to know that the security team consistently patches “critical” vulnerabilities within seven days in accordance with its vulnerability
management program policy.
• Reduced remediation costs as control deficiencies are identified and fixed before they escalate.
• Increased visibility into the organization’s risk, security, and compliance posture for senior leaders.
• Improved ability to prioritize risk management decisions.
• Improved standing in the eyes of regulators, customers, and auditors with readily available evidence of risk mitigation, protection of valuable assets, and the
organization’s ability to meet its legal obligations.
Continuous Control Monitoring, when implemented effectively is an efficient way to handle that pressure.
Increased Visibility and Transparency of Operations: Real-time monitoring increases the visibility and transparency of activity, especially negatively impacting activities, and
mitigate the operational risk with a timely alert system that enables a good risk management and governance.
Analyzes and Traces Root Cause: A Continuous Control Monitoring tool can help analysts detect the correlation and root cause of certain critical anomalies. It enables the
corrections of root cause element anywhere within systems. This brings substantial performance achievement for the business.
Enables Rapid Response: Ultimately, the goal of Continuous Monitoring is to provide the organizations with fastest feedback, insight into business process controls and
interdependencies across the entire operations cycle. This helps drive operational, security and business performance.

3. Total visibility
Get a trusted, automated inventory
of all assets, accounts, apps and
cloud systems by combining data
from across your security and
business tools.
Complete control
With an automated inventory, you
can immediately uncover missing
assets and security control gaps. This
reduces the chance of a control
failure and builds confidence in
security reporting.
Faster remediation
Save time and rapidly reduce risk by
prioritising remediation campaigns
based on business context. Trusted,
reliable reporting improves
accountability by tracking fixes
against SLAs.