RSA Charge made for great week of speakers, networking, and evening fun at RSA’s annual event this past week at Disney in Orlando, Florida. With up to eight different client presentations every hour, attendees could follow a pre-designated track or pick and choose presentations or labs that best met their interest. Cential sent four of our senior consultants to the event, and with so many potential sessions, each person had their own key takeaways. However, all four consultants agreed, there were several common themes that arose out of event:

• Focus on User Experience: Over the past few years, it’s no secret that RSA’s competition has targeted Archer’s UX experience as a soft spot for the GRC giant. At Charge, RSA made it clear that it is focused on improving its UX capabilities, including new color pallets, reporting capabilities, and several other long-sought after enhancements. At this time, RSA has asked attendees not to share specifics of the updates, but we are excited to see the new capabilities added to the upcoming version 6.7 and are happy to discuss the specifics of any of the change with our clients (info@cential.co ). 

• Automation: A big theme from many of the client presentations was the push for more automation in their risk, security, and compliance  programs. The burden of running a full GRC program, both from a system maintenance perspective and executing compliance activities, can be costly and time consuming. Organizations are starting to automate:
  • Control Testing: Automated Control Testing enables organizations to automatically execute control tests and sync the results with RSA Archer. Enabling an organization to run control tests more frequently and without an auditor/compliance professionals ongoing involvement.
  • RSA Archer System Testing: Automated System Testing is supplementing User Acceptance Testing to support regression testing, deployment tests, and ongoing system health checks. At Cential we have seen a variety of tools being utilized in this space with mixed results when used with RSA Archer. We continue to seek out new ways to help our clients save time and our currently exploring new automated system testing options to bring to our clients. 

• Updates to SAAS Offerings: RSA has officially partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and will start providing the option to move SAAS solutions to Amazon Web Services. Enabling Data Feeds without professional services, some control to the Archer Control Panel (ACP), and in 2020, the ability to add PII and HI in the SAAS environment. Since companies already had the capability to host their own solution on AWS, at Cential we are watching this roll-out closely to determine if the cost of RSA Archer hosted solutions will continue to provide the value. 

Want to find out more about the conference or how Cential can help support your RSA Archer program. Contact Cential today!