Archer Integrated Risk Management Platform vs. AuditBoard

RSA Archer is fantastic at cataloguing, personalizing assessments, raw reporting, and capacity to add custom fields. It is a little clunky around adding contextual information to notifications, peeking into data before attempting to load pages, quick navigation or determining linked (or sub-linked) relationships. These are all concerns that can either be worked around with an appropriate data scheme or with careful administration of the sub-routines.

Incentivized

Auditboard is especially useful for SOX control testing. It is very convenient having all our information on a single platform. It is easy to communicate PBC requests to clients, store control testing working papers for review, communicate deficiencies and build dashboards to provide visual statistics. Situations where it might not be useful are for organizations that are smaller in size where the templates don't fit well with their internal audit/controls program. There is a significant amount of testing required before using the platform, and adapting working papers to fit in well with AuditBoard

Incentivized

• Integration capabilities to multiple enterprise systems
• Control standards and Procedures to address multiple regulatory/authoritative sources, standards and frameworks enabling test once satisfy many requiremnts
• Rapid application development and User friendly tool with configuration capability to customize easily without user requiring programming or coding skills

• AuditBoard allows real-time collaboration between control and business owners and auditors.
• AuditBoard has a lot of fantastic training sessions and office hours to help users make the most of the product.
• AuditBoard has great customer service personnel to answer questions and troubleshoot any issues.

Incentivized

• They release time to time updates, which causes issues in the GUI. However, one has to be careful while installing the update.
• There is no open and free academy to learn more about the tool.
• One cannot stay to a particular product version, they have to move to the next version to keep up with the changes.

Incentivized

• We used to perform our Risk Control Analysis (RCA) for each audit's planning in an Excel spreadsheet. Once we purchased the Risk Oversight module, AuditBoard helped us convert the RCA to a system function rather than a spreadsheet. At first, we lost some of the functionality the spreadsheet provided, but AuditBoard did continue to help us build and work towards a solution more similar to what we previously had. Though happy with it, it's still not perfect. As one example, I'd like to be able to link actual Ops Audit work steps that cover the risk and controls being outlined in the RCA, rather than just adding a comment to state which steps cover them. More of a preference, I suppose.
• I also had demoed their beta Resources and Scheduling module, but it didn't have enough functionality at the time to work for how we put the quarterly Internal Audit schedule together (using Excel). One thing I recall was that you couldn't pull in SOX controls or non-chargeable work (such as education or administration) to auditor's schedules; it was meant to schedule the Ops Audits only. It is possible they have already fixed or improved this; I just haven't seen the updated version.

Incentivized

Good tool to get the information communicated, approval workflow, and easy to add new findings/questionnaires. Seems to be compatible with different browsers and little downtime. Only request for improvement is to add an export feature with fewer clicks. Maybe batch export.

Incentivized

Our RSA Archer team is dedicated to finding solutions for our organization. They haven't mentioned any issues with receiving support with deployment or bug fixes, and generally the platform is very dependable. They are always very excited about delivering a version upgrade and presenting any new features that provide more dashboards or chart types.

Incentivized

It has been roughly 5 years since I have seen Securevue, so a lot can change, but to me it felt like several products were purchased and an attempt was made to piece them all together into a single solution (and I believe that may have been true). It also required agents on endpoints which did not fit the model I believed customers were looking for. MetricStream appeared to be difficult to install as it took their own engineers some time to get it installed in my lab environment. I did not think their web interface was as intuitive as RSA Archer. Customization to the platform was possible to some degree, but required a lot more work and technical skills than required by Archer. I did like the landing page for MetricStream which called out the important action items for the current user, but Archer v6.X now has this feature.

Incentivized

I remember there were a lot of sync issues when I used the internally developed software, but that's probably because a few people were working on the same project at the same time. I have not come across this issue in AuditBoard

Incentivized

• We were able to achieve approx 63% gain in operational efficiency.
• Reduce the number of findings and exceptions during an Internal audit to almost zero.
• Get compliance to all client contracts tracked through the tool thus increasing the confidence of clients in our systems and processes.

Incentivized

• Hard to quantify. It was cheaper than the tool we had and we were able to get rid of standalone tool for surveys. overall, just better user experience for all.

Incentivized