Internal auditors play the critical role of being the third line of defense. When risk owners and management do not identify risk or adequately mitigate the risk, it is imperative for the internal auditors to provide independent and objective insight on risk. The audit management solutions market caters to this need by automating internal audit operations through its primary and secondary offerings. Audit management solutions help manage the complexity of the auditor's role, not the organization's risk.
Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM) software is a technology platform that automatically and continuously tests and verifies the effectiveness of an organization’s internal controls in real or near-real time. By integrating with systems like ERP, CRM, and financial platforms, it detects control failures, policy violations, or anomalies before they escalate. Key features include real-time visibility, automated control testing, and proactive notifications. This proactive approach delivers benefits such as early detection of errors, fraud, and compliance gaps, reduced manual audit workload, and stronger risk management. CCM software is widely used by compliance teams, internal auditors, risk managers, security professionals, and finance departments across industries such as banking, healthcare, and manufacturing.
Corporate Compliance and Oversight (CCO) tools provide the framework and support for standardization of compliance activities and automation to increase efficiency and effectiveness of compliance management programs. CCO enables a common cross-enterprise approach to IT compliance activities that most affect the regulatory oversight of corporate governance. This is done through support of the five major requirements for managing a compliance program: policy development, aggregation and normalization, control monitoring, workflow management, and case management.
The IT risk management (ITRM) market focuses on solutions that support the ITRM discipline through automating common workflows and requirements. For the purposes of defining this market, IT risks are risks within the scope and responsibility of the IT department. These include IT dependencies that create uncertainty in daily tactical business activities, and IT risk events resulting from inadequate or failed internal IT processes, people or systems, or from external events.
Gartner defines Integrated risk management (IRM) as the combined technology, processes and data that serves to fulfill the objective of enabling the simplification, automation and integration of strategic, operational and IT risk management across an organization.