What a year! Big changes for the company – our IPO, numerous new hires, many new customers, and countless product releases, just to name a few.
Throughout 2021 we have continued to see teams working in a distributed fashion due to the pandemic. The need for a compliance management platform to help teams work together remotely and provide visibility of risks and controls has only increased. At the same time, we have seen a surge in digitalization in almost every industry changing the way businesses are operating and GRC processes have been no exception. Against this backdrop, Impero continues to help compliance teams stay on top of their risk and control environment.
In 2021, we worked hard to simplify compliance management even more. Based on valuable customer and partner feedback and market trends, we focused our product development efforts on three main areas:
Improving the efficiency of the control administration
Security in different forms
Enabling a more flexible, risk-based control review process
As we continue on this exciting journey, we want to take a look back on 2021 and share some product highlights:
Easier and more efficient control program administration with bulk updates
Most of our customers have large user bases, complex company structures, multiple control programs, and dozens of running controls. In this context, changes to control programs can become tedious, repetitive work. Therefore, we have improved the administration of the Impero platform by allowing updates to be carried out in bulk, saving control managers a lot of time. Administrators can now carry bulk updates of control details, login preferences, tags, and very soon scheduling.
More advanced and risk- based control review process – “4-eyes review”
We introduced the 4-eyes review feature, to support more complex and increasingly risk-based control processes. Organizations may have numerous controls, but not all those controls are of equal importance. Some might need a stricter control review workflow when justified by the risk level or internal processes. With the 4-eyes review feature, users can assign a control and require that the execution be reviewed by two reviewers, before the control is considered executed successfully.
Stronger login security with integration of one of the world leading identity providers
Users can authenticate using their enterprise identity with the Okta integration, making it secure and straightforward to access Impero. Okta runs in the cloud on a secure, reliable, extensively audited platform, which integrates deeply with on-premises applications, directories, and identity management systems. You can now find Impero on the Okta Integration Network.
Meeting the information security standards for the German automotive industry
In the beginning of 2021, we met the strong requirements set forth by TISAX. TISAX, which stands for Trusted Information Security Assessment Exchange, is an assessment and exchange mechanism for the information security of businesses working in the heavily regulated automotive sector. This is a testament to our commitment to the highest security standards to protect our customers’ data.
In-app product news
We implemented a way to communicate to users directly in the Impero platform when new useful features are rolled out. Upon login a pop-up message will inform users with administration rights about the new available features so they can get even more value from our ever–evolving platform.
User Management improvements
The mere overview and administration of control assignments can get complex in large international enterprises. People can move internally, resign, or simply be on leave. We therefore recognized the need to enhance our user management capabilities. We have improved visibility into each user’s control assignments and introduced the possibility of removing, changing, or re-assigning control tasks.
New access rights
We made significant changes to our access and authorization concept in order to accommodate our many customers with governance procedures requiring strict segregation of duties. It is now easier to differentiate between users with various levels of access rights.
French version of platform
We launched the platform in French to accommodate our growing number of international customers using the platform. In addition to French, the platform is now available in English, German, Spanish, and Danish.
Hear from one our German customers, TRUMPF, who uses Impero across various functions in their global organizational setup.
“Impero is an easy, smart and simple tool, which everybody can work with. From the person who sets up the control to the person who completes the control – it’s an easy way to work.”
Patrick Kinzelmann Risk & ICS Manager, TRUMPF
A great thank you to all our customers for their valuable insight helping us continuously improve the platform. We look forward to working together with you in 2022.
Looking forward
As 2021 comes to an end, we look forward to another year of continued developments to the platform and supporting our customers as they simplify their compliance management. As we continue to grow, our focus will stay on our long-term commitments announced in our IPO document.
- Increasing interoperability
- Risk Evolution
- Efficient control management
- Improved reporting options
- Internal audit
- And of course, continuous focus on security as well as usability.
During the first half of 2022, we will focus on improving risk management and showing historical views of the risk landscape, on the interoperability with customers’ enterprise technical landscape to exchange risk data, and on providing more actionable compliance insights based on the activities carried out on the platform.
Happy Holidays and see you in 2022 for another exciting year!
Pssst… Did you know that?
You can send reports directly to your colleagues’ email inbox so they can see the status of compliance activities without having to log into the platform? Not only does this improve the visibility of compliance in your organization, but also pushes completion stats in the right direction. For instance, when a head of finance or the managing director of a given business unit receives a status report, they will be reminded of the actions that are needed in order to get their organization stats up.
Read more here or contact our customer success team for an overview of how to set up push reports.
A note for those of you still using Internet Explorer 11.
Microsoft is ending support of IE11 on 17 August 2021. We have decided to follow suit and will be ending support for IE11 by 31st December 2021. Impero will continue to run on IE11, but fixes specific to IE11 will no longer be prioritized.
Please click here for more information about browser support and technical requirements.
