Is Continuous Compliance Assurance Possible?

The increased threat of legal sanctions or fines for failure to comply with laws and regulations make it imperative that auditors assess the level of compliance with information sharing policies and regulations in a timely manner. Embedding a monitoring mechanism, such as our Continuous Compliance Assurance (CCA) module, into a technology solution for inter-organizational information sharing, if not too costly in processing, would ensure appropriately timed compliance enforcement. A test-bed, which incorporated our CCA module, was built to capture realistic processing statistics. Through this test-bed, we have observed a limiting factor imposed by XML based processing. The feasibility of CCA rests on the reduction of these limiting factors. Accordingly we present two approaches to mitigate these issues.