Demystifying End User Computing Regulatory Frameworks and Why It Matters

It is no secret that government regulations are a necessary fact of business life. From the government’s perspective, regulations are established for a myriad of reasons ranging from protecting consumers, safeguarding the environment, ensuring fair market competition, promoting public safety, and achieving societal goals by setting standards for businesses and individuals, to the end result of creating a safer and more equitable society.

From the business’s perspective, poorly crafted regulations actually hinder innovation and economic growth when their design and implementation creates massive overhead to ensure and report on compliance. This overhead and the risk of penalties for noncompliance is magnified tenfold from end users taking it upon themselves to utilize their version of computing outside regulated IT infrastructure.

End User Computing Revisited

End User Computing (EUC) exists because business demands speed, and current IT infrastructure is not setup for flexibility or the ability to democratize data and democratize AI. While EUC can enhance flexibility and responsiveness and shows the promise of answering many current digital transformation project challenges, it also introduces risks related to data integrity, security, compliance, and operational efficiency if not properly managed. This has the potential to introduce huge problems, especially for regulatory compliance, in certain industries like banking and financial services as well as all public companies.

EUC Regulatory Frameworks Demystified

The fines associated with noncompliance can be staggering, ranging from $millions to $billions. To protect your business from potential regulatory fines from EUC misuse, you should first understand what regulations have the most potential for impact. These six regulations will require some attention:

• International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Framework: establishes global principles for the preparation and presentation of financial statements to ensure transparency, comparability, and consistency in financial reporting.
  
  EUC tools are widely used to support financial reporting processes, including consolidation, adjustments, and disclosures. Proper governance of EUC tools is essential to align with the IFRS Framework’s requirements for accuracy, transparency, and accountability.
• Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) Framework: provides a comprehensive structure for designing, implementing, and evaluating internal controls to achieve organizational objectives in operations, reporting, and compliance.
  
  EUC tools are integral to business operations, especially for financial reporting, risk management, and decision-making. Proper governance of EUC tools aligns directly with the principles and components of the COSO framework.
• Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank): introduced comprehensive regulations to improve transparency, accountability, and stability in the financial system by imposing stringent requirements on financial institutions for reporting, governance, and risk management.
  
  EUC tools are widely used in financial operations, regulatory reporting, and risk management, making their effective governance critical to Dodd-Frank compliance.
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): is a comprehensive data privacy and protection law that applies to organizations handling the personal data of European Union residents. It emphasizes accountability, data security, and privacy by design.
  
  EUC tools are often used to manage, process, and store personal data, making their governance critical to GDPR compliance.
• Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX): requires enhanced corporate governance and financial transparency, primarily targeting public companies and emphasizes accurate financial reporting, internal controls and accountability.
  
  EUC tools are heavily utilized to support financial reporting, forecasting, and other compliance-critical tasks, making their governance essential under SOX.
• Basel III: establishes a framework for strengthening regulation, supervision, and risk management within the banking sector providing for a significant impact with the heightened need for accurate, reliable, and secure data to ensure compliance with its rigorous standards.
  
  EUC tools play a critical role in this context.

Ensuring Compliance While Addressing Core EUC Issues

The most effective means to satisfy business requirements, control EUC misuse and ensure regulatory compliance is to implement a data intelligence cloud for AI. Specifically, a unified platform that eliminates silos and integrates with existing infrastructure and 3rd party data, combining business and IT to remain secure and competitive.

Emerging open source, no-code intelligent cloud solutions like UBIX can deliver on the promise of a data intelligence cloud for AI to supercharge the quality of reporting and analysis. It starts with a comprehensive access to all available data. By consuming all on-premise infrastructure, cloud-based infrastructure and cloud application datasets directly, UBIX makes the integration seamless and ensures that your existing data assets are fully utilized by LOB with a simple natural language query. This is what also frees data scientists and data analysts to address innovations instead of generating more superfluous reports.

Realizing the promise of a data intelligent cloud for AI starts with an understanding of the realities (as opposed to the hype) of emerging GenAI with a no code solution that delivers on the promise of bridging the communication gap between the average business executive and the average technical/IT resource. Download our free eBook titled “5 steps to AI Business Transformation Success” to help better understand the nuance of emerging GenAI business concepts, and offer details on the 5 steps to ensure digital transformation success. Or if you can spare 22 minutes for a mini–2025 Data Intelligence Cloud for AI Workshop, you can contact one of our experts today.