If you are currently using spreadsheets or databases to manage business critical activities like risk and compliance, then you’ll know that they have some big disadvantages. Not only are spreadsheets and databases hard to maintain and audit, they also lack visibility and accessibility to the key stakeholders across the organization.

Feature

Spreadsheets

Lumension® Risk Manager

Comment
Easy to Setup, Use and Manage While spreadsheets must be heavily modified to store compliance data, Lumension® Risk Manager is purpose-built software that is ready to capture compliance data out of the box.
Out-of-the-Box Security Controls, Reports and Dashboards
Lumension® Risk Manager includes content from the Unified Compliance Framework, giving you access to the controls needed for compliance with over 400 regulations spanning various industries and geographies.
Flexible and Adaptable (e.g., custom fields, formulas, layouts, etc.)
Both approaches allow end users to record the unique characteristics of assets that are relevant to their organization.
Support for Advanced Functionality (e.g., compensating controls, surveys, exceptions, attribute-based grouping of subjects, etc.)
As purpose-built software for risk and compliance management, Lumension® Risk Manager includes the ability to handle advanced tasks such as documenting compensating controls, exception request & approval workflows, web-based surveys for data collection, and attribute-based grouping of assets for convenient organization and reporting.
Workflow and Approvals Automation
Lumension® Risk Manager provides integrated workflow, including approvals for key compliance-affecting decisions.
Good Support for Data Management
Lumension® Risk Manager automatically records scoring history and trend data, making it easy to see how compliance status has changed over time.
Alerts & Notifications on Metrics and Compliance Scores
Where spreadsheets are a passive data repository, Lumension® Risk Manager continuously monitors key metrics and sends notifications when assets drop below their defined compliance threshold.
Auditable and Transparent Changes (e.g., activity tracking)
Lumension® Risk Manager provides a detailed audit history of changes to the system and scoring data, helping enforce accountability and accuracy for compliance data.
Support for Collaborative Working / Multi-User Access
As a web-based application, Lumension® Risk Manager allows for simultaneous use by multiple users from distributed locations.
Extensive Risk & Compliance Support and Training Available
Lumension stands behind Lumension® Risk Manager with a support and services team that can help you accomplish your compliance goals with Lumension® Risk Manager.
Easy to Integrate with 3rd-Party Products
Lumension® Risk Manager integrates with external products - like vulnerability scanners and patch management products - to automatically incorporate that data into your compliance picture, ensuring accuracy of technical reporting and eliminating the burden of manually transferring data from reports into your compliance repository.
Scalability
Lumension® Risk Manager can scale to a large environments and keep all of your compliance data in a single, secure, and accessible repository.

The bottom line is that, while spreadsheets are simple to use, they are not out-of-the-box ready for compliance & risk management. So they can quickly get cumbersome, meaning you will spend a lot more time setting it up and tweaking it than you will actually working on making your compliance & risk posture better.


Legend

 - Fully Supported

- Partially Supported

- Not Supported