Oracle rounds up content management, governance, and compliance apps in one tidy package

Oracle recently consolidated a number of applications and compliance-related processes from its ERP products into the Oracle Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) suite. There are solutions for content management and data management, as well as analytic reporting capabilities used for documenting The Sarbanes-Oxley Act and its equivalents in other nations.

Previously, some of these capabilities were available separately within various Oracle applications. However, GRC consolidates them while leveraging content management capabilities gained from Oracle's acquisition of Stellent; the integration capabilities of Oracle Fusion middleware; the data-access control capabilities of the Oracle database; and the analytics of Oracle's Business Intelligence offerings.

Oracle GRC will work across each of the Oracle applications and through published interfaces. It also will accept data from outside sources such as SAP, other third-party packages, or homegrown systems.

The current release of Oracle GRC includes a Governance, Risk, and Compliance Manager module where relevant compliance activities are monitored through a dashboard, with problem areas highlighted. For processes that already are automated—such as financial controls within the ERP system—it will provide self-corrective capabilities for processes in danger of falling out of compliance.

An Application Access Controls module has a library of data access controls used for enforcing segregation of duty measures. The module comes bundled with more than 200 rules that can be specifically applied to the Oracle E-Business Suite. Additionally, the Oracle Application Configuration Controls module consolidates 500 controls previously available separately from Oracle's various applications.

Release of an analytic component—Oracle Fusion GRC Intelligence—is expected later this year to analyze compliance or risk management trends.