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2024 is shaping up to be a complex year for compliance. 

From the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) to the looming global regulations on AI, businesses this year will need to adapt to a host of fresh laws and regulations across various industries and regions. 

At the same time, they must navigate an already complex web of compliance requirements to ensure their operations are legal, secure, and ethical, while also adhering to everyday legal requirements like the Data Protection Act and the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).

The problem is that many businesses lack the internal expertise or dedicated resources to navigate the intricacies of compliance. 

At the same time, hiring and retaining qualified compliance professionals can be expensive, and smaller businesses may struggle to justify the cost.

That’s where compliance management software solutions enter the picture. 

What are Compliance Management Solutions?

Compliance management solutions are software designed to help businesses track, manage, and automate their compliance obligations.

These solutions automate many manual tasks associated with compliance management systems, such as risk assessments, training management, and document control. They also free up valuable time and resources for employees to focus on other core business activities, while improving collaboration between teams and stakeholders, and alerting teams to any concerning events or relevant changes.

While some vendors do offer compliance management as a standalone solution, it is more common to see multi-use platforms and GRC solutions.

Why is compliance management important?

why is compliance management important

Solid compliance management software can help businesses identify and address potential compliance risks before they escalate into major issues, significantly reducing their chances of facing penalties while safeguarding their business's legal standing.

Consumers and stakeholders are also increasingly demanding transparency and ethical practices from businesses, and they often favour companies with strong compliance practices, customers may be more likely to choose a compliant business over one with a history of non-compliance.

Compliance management often involves streamlining processes and implementing controls, which can result in increased efficiency and cost savings. For example, a well-defined data privacy policy can help avoid data breaches and the associated costs of remediation.

Many compliance regulations, especially those concerning data security, require companies to implement robust cybersecurity measures. By complying with these regulations, businesses can significantly reduce the risk of cyberattacks and data breaches, protecting sensitive information and customer privacy.

Compliance management is ultimately about operating ethically and responsibly. Businesses that implement it contribute to a fairer and more sustainable business environment for everyone.

Choosing Compliance Management Software

Finding the best compliance management solution for your needs can be tricky. The solution you choose directly impacts the ability to navigate the complex regulatory landscape efficiently and effectively. 

With careful consideration, you can find one that aligns perfectly with your business needs. Here are some key things to consider when choosing compliance management software:

  • Specific Regulations: Identify the precise regulations your business must comply with, whether it be GDPR, the Digital Services Act, or another regulation related to your industry. 
  • Current Practices: Evaluate your existing compliance workflow. Is it manual, time-consuming, or has compliance gaps?
  • Desired Outcomes: Define your goals. Are you looking to reduce risks, improve efficiency, enhance reporting?
  • Budget and Resources: Consider your investment capacity and available technical expertise for implementing compliance software. Do you have a dedicated team for managing compliance? 
  • Data Security and Privacy: Ensure the solution adheres to data security and privacy regulations relevant to your industry and location.
  • Vendor Reputation and Track Record: Research the vendor's reputation, client base, and experience in your industry.
  • Customization Options: Some solutions offer customization options to tailor them to your specific needs and workflows.
  • Free Trials and Pilot Programs: Many vendors offer free trials or pilot programs to test the solution before committing.

Best Compliance Management Software 

There are a variety of compliance management solutions available today, each with its own set of features, benefits and limitations you need to consider when navigating the regulatory landscape. 

In this list, we’re counting down the ten best compliance management software, each of which provides businesses with the tools they need to stay ahead of the regulatory curve.

Adept 

Synergies Software’s Adept manages compliance through documents and associated workflows, providing a central repository for storing, organizing, and controlling all compliance-related documents, ensuring easy access and version control. The platform provides a single solution for managing all compliance-related documents, records, and workflows, centralising control, improving data accessibility, and eliminating information silos. Features like document encryption, access control, and an extensive audit trail that tracks all user activity and changes made to documents also all come built-in, making it easy for organisations to keep data integrity and meet stringent security requirements.

Adept allows you to customize workflows to fit your specific compliance processes, ensuring efficient and consistent execution. It also integrates with various enterprise resource planning (ERP) and content management systems, streamlining data flow and reducing manual data entry to make managing compliance as seamless as possible. This focus on user-friendliness, smart automation, and secure document management makes Adept a great compliance solution for improving compliance efficiency and reducing risks across your organization. 

Resolver

Resolver is a cloud-based, enterprise-grade platform designed to simplify and streamline compliance management for organizations of all sizes. It offers a holistic and integrated approach, empowering businesses to navigate the challenges of staying compliant by Identifying, assessing, and prioritising compliance risks across your organization. Users can create and maintain a detailed inventory of all applicable regulations, ensuring nothing gets overlooked. They can also implement and monitor controls to mitigate identified risks and ensure adherence to regulations.

With a fully customisable and configurable risk management platform, Resolver is an industry-leading service for governance, risk and compliance management. Companies can deliver best-in-class GRC programs with a convenient all-in-one technology ecosystem. It even has a tool for automating your processes, so you can accomplish more when upgrading your business. If you're looking for a reliable and effective software solution to navigate the complexities of compliance management, Resolver is worth considering.

Diligent HighBond

Diligent’s HighBond compliance platform helps organizations meet their organization’s specific GRC needs by consolidating and streamlining their process. The platform uses advanced to make deep insights accessible to the everyday user, allowing you to develop effective workflow automation with ease, regardless of tech fluency. It also provides a range of powerful data visualization tools and ready-to-use dashboards and reports you can use to deliver key insights to improve compliance performance, risk exposure, and audit results. 

HighBond offers a unified platform encompassing various modules for risk management, eliminating the need for multiple-point solutions and ensuring seamless data flow across functionalities. The platform comes with pre-configured content and best practices specific to various industries too, saving you time and ensuring you stay aligned with regulations specific to your business. It’s also incredibly scaleable and scales seamlessly to accommodate the evolving needs of organizations as they grow, while its modular design allows for customization and tailoring to specific compliance requirements.

Holistic AI

Holistic AI's compliance platform goes beyond traditional compliance management by incorporating comprehensive AI governance features to help keep businesses AI-compliant. Specialising in AI regulation and compliance, the platform focuses on ensuring ethical, transparent, and trustworthy AI deployment, addressing the specific challenges associated with AI compliance. It provides continuous monitoring of your organisation's AI risk profile while suggesting mitigating residual risk found in your AI systems. 

Unlike traditional compliance solutions, Holistic AI's platform is specifically built for AI. It understands the nuances of AI systems, including potential biases, explainability, and robustness, offering targeted risk assessments and mitigation strategies. The platform aligns with the European Union's risk-based approach to AI governance, helping organizations assess and manage risks associated with their AI systems based on their potential impact and societal risks. If you're developing or deploying AI systems, Holistic AI offers a compelling solution for managing compliance and ensuring responsible AI practices. Their focus on Trustworthy AI, unique features, and risk-based approach address the specific challenges of AI compliance, making them a valuable partner for organizations navigating this complex landscape.

Archer Regulatory and Corporate Compliance Management

Archer’s Regulatory & Corporate Compliance Management (RCCM) solution specifically caters to organizations facing intricate regulatory landscapes and diverse compliance needs. The platform allows you to consolidate information from multiple regulatory bodies, document their impact on the business, and establish a sustainable, repeatable and auditable regulatory compliance and data privacy program. You can also quickly produce real-time reports and user-specific dashboards to view regulatory news by provider, type and impact and monitor the overall status of your regulatory compliance program and gain valuable insights into your overall compliance posture.

Archer automate compliance workflows and controls testing to reduce time burdens on resources and minimize the risk of compliance failures. The company also maintain a comprehensive library of relevant regulations to ensure your compliance efforts remain aligned with evolving requirements. You can analyze the impact of regulations on your business processes, identifying areas requiring adjustments and prioritizing compliance activities, allowing you to develop, manage, and distribute policies and procedures to ensure everyone understands and adheres to compliance guidelines.

Compliance.ai

Compliance.ai is the only regulatory change management software solution specifically designed to mitigate risk, reduce costs, and increase confidence in compliance status in the banking, financial services, and insurance industries. Its flagship product, the Regulatory Change Management Platform uses AI to automatically monitor regulatory changes from various sources, analyze their impact, and map them to your internal policies and procedures. It then summarises the obligations within each regulation and identifies jurisdictional differences, saving you time and reducing the burden of manual analysis. This patented approach combines AI with the expertise of human analysts, ensuring accurate and reliable identification of relevant regulatory changes and their implications.

The Regulatory Change Management Platform features intuitive workflows for tracking, assigning, and completing compliance tasks, ensuring transparency and accountability. It has a range of reporting and analytics tools, enabling you to track compliance progress, identify trends, and generate reports for regulators and stakeholders. It also offers a comprehensive library of pre-analyzed regulations relevant to the financial services industry, saving time and ensuring alignment with relevant requirements. Compliance.ai integrates with various core banking and risk management systems, streamlining data flow and eliminating manual data entry.

Informatica 

You might know Informatica for its industry-leading cloud data management tools, but the company also has a suite of compliance management and data governance solutions under the umbrella of its Informatica Enterprise Cloud Data Management (ECDM) platform. Its Enterprise Data Catalogue, for instance, makes it easy to discover and manage all your enterprise data assets, allowing you to mitigate compliance risks associated with data privacy, security, and quality across your organisation. The platform also provides pre-configured modules for various regulations, such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA, mapping data assets to relevant regulations and automating compliance tasks associated with them. This creates a consistent and accurate view of critical data entities while saving you time and resources trying to keep your data secure and compliant

Informatica’s diverse range of compliance solutions cater to compliance needs with specialized tools for data governance, data integration, master data management, and cloud-based solutions. Informatica PowerCenter, for instance, streamlines data extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) processes to ensure accurate and timely data reporting for compliance requirements. Meanwhile, Informatica Cloud Data Integration (CDI) automatically integrates data across cloud and on-premises environments, ensuring consistent compliance practices across your IT infrastructure.

SAP Security and GRC Solutions ​​​​​​​

SAP offers a suite of security and compliance management tools and solutions to help you stay compliant and navigate the regulatory landscape, As a recognised leader across critical GRC categories, the company combines meaningful insights with reports to help companies operate at their top speed without compromising on safety. You can continuously monitor risks, identities, cyber threats, and compliance across your mission-critical systems, ensuring you stay compliant and keep your data secure. And with features like risk analysis built-in, you can track the potential problems in your business landscape and make immediate changes to avoid violations. 

It’s important to note that SAP's compliance solutions are not standalone products. Instead, they integrate seamlessly with other SAP software like S/4HANA and SuccessFactors to create a unified platform for managing risk and compliance across various business processes. Still, the company offers industry-specific compliance solutions tailored to the unique regulations and challenges faced by various sectors, such as healthcare, finance, and energy. You’ll also have access to things like Access Request management and business role management to help with wider company growth.

OneTrust

Designed to help you visualize all the data coming into your organization, OneTrust makes it easy to ensure compliance and honour customer rights, choice, and transparency across your organisation The company’s GRC and Security Assurance Cloud specifically addresses compliance management needs, help organizations navigate data privacy regulations and security standards while eliminating silos and streamlining compliance processes within a single platform. This holistic approach is made possible through the company’s suite of interconnected solutions that integrate various functionalities for privacy, security, and governance into a single platform, eliminating the need for multiple-point solutions and streamlining overall compliance management. These solutions provide tools to manage data subject rights requests effectively, including data access, rectification, and erasure, helping organizations comply with data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA.

Trusted by over 10,000 customers around the world, OneTrust offers a vast library of compliance tools, pre-built content and templates for various regulations and industry standards. The platform automates many manual compliance tasks – such as risk assessments, policy management, incident response, and reporting – to save you time and resources while ensuring compliance. OneTrust’s simple and easy-to-use interface also makes it easier for businesses of all sizes to find the crucial company information they need for auditing purposes, providing a powerful compliance software solution without the steep learning curve. 

Hyperproof

With its user-friendly interface, flexible risk assessment framework, and powerful reporting capabilities, Hyperproof is a phenomenal choice for organisations looking to keep themselves compliant in 2024. The cloud-based platform is designed with the user in mind, featuring an easy-to-navigate dashboard that allows users to users to manage diverse compliance requirements seamlessly – from regulatory mandates to internal policies. You also have access to a huge collection of quickstart templates from the get-go, covering SOC 2, NIST 800-53, NIST CSF, NIST Privacy, PCI, and SOX, among others.

What makes Hyperproof stand out from other entries on other entries on this compliance solutions list is the sheer range of features built into its platform. Users can automate everything from data collection to risk management and reporting, allowing them to easily visualise and analyse compliance data. The hyperproof platform is also extremely customisable and can be integrated with a wide range of software including Slack, Zoom, AWS, Azure Google Drive and more. You can also sign up to be a Hyperproof and take advantage of their API to create your own, custom integrations.