We often have requests from clients who need to understand either the regulations that are relevant to an application, that an application needs to adhere to, or which applications hold classified data, for example confidential data.
It’s easy in Essential to achieve both these needs.
Regulations
Understanding the regulations that apply to an application is important to all organisations. As we all know, regulations change fairly frequently and being able to easily see which applications are impacted by such changes makes these a little bit easier to manage.
Essential provides a quick way to do this though an “Applicable Regulations” slot on the Application class. Simply complete this and this detail will be shown on the Application Summary, for an individual application, or as a table to show all applications impacted by one or more regulations.
Application Summary Showing Regulations
Data Classifications
Most organisations will have classified their data, for example as Sensitive, Confidential, Public and so on. This classification is not specific to one regulation, but is a policy applied across the organisation’s data to ensure proper handling of the data and to understand operational risk.
In Essential the classifications that apply to an application can be seen, as well as the detail of the classified data object and the database table that it is held in. The key is that we classify the data, not the application, so the view can infer from the data held which applications hold classified data. This avoids having to hard coding the classification for each application so, for example, you can say a piece of data is sensitive for data privacy purposes. As such, any application using that data can be automatically tagged as managing classified data – we often see people manually go through each application and do this, you don’t need to if you already have your data mapped, just classify the data.
Once you have your data classified, you can quickly and easily see, for example, which applications hold sensitive data, which may be needed to ensure adherence to regulations.
Application Summary showing Classified Data
Whether you have a high-level view of regulations mapped to applications, or a detailed data classification policy, Essential can support your needs. Contact us for a demo.