Build a monitoring program yourself using Excel and ad hoc documentation
Leverage the tools you already have to analyze the data you can see. Reduces upfront costs but drains resource to build, manage, and maintain.
- Limited up front costs
- All data connections and integrations managed
- No business context or data enrichment capabilities
- No automated way to verify denominators, detect stale data, or reconcile conflicting inventories
- Lack of audit trail when boards or regulators challenge your numbers
Buyer's checklist
What building your own basic controls monitoring program entails
Face minimal costs by bringing accessible data sets from across the business into one or more documents. Although this option provides a quick and relatively efficient way to primarily review data, limited functionality makes it difficult to perform any complex analysis. The scale of data and interrelated data points make Excel unusable in the longer term.
Results are often misinterpreted with no verification or normalization processes in place, leading to mismatched priorities and ongoing control gaps. Under NIS2 and SEC disclosure rules, the inability to provide evidence-based, traceable compliance data is increasingly a legal exposure.
Pros
- Low barrier to entry and widely available using a common skillset
- Minimal costs
- Helpful and quick for small scale monitoring
Cons
- Struggles to manage data volumes from 61+ data sources
- No verification or normalization — high risk of human error
- Cannot detect compound risks or cross-domain control failures
- No AI-powered triage or metric prioritization
- Cannot produce audit-quality evidence for DORA or NIS2 compliance
- Reliance on tacit knowledge that may leave the business in future
Panaseer recommendation
Many organizations start their controls assurance journey here. Issues with data handling, scalability, verification and analysis can fuel a lack of confidence in reporting outputs — and could leave the business vulnerable to prosecution under cyber disclosure legislation. As reporting demands and scope creep, many organizations turn to a dedicated CCM platform that delivers automatically enriched data, contextualized insights, and out-of-the-box framework mapping.