Industry Descriptor: A National Passenger Rail and Critical Transportation Provider
The Challenge
As the organization matured its risk program, it faced the risk of significant “control sprawl.” Managing thousands of individual control objectives across hundreds of systems manually was becoming unsustainable. The compliance team needed a way to identify common controls—minimum security requirements shared across the enterprise—to drastically reduce redundant testing and documentation efforts.
The Solution
The organization implemented a specialized Common Control Analyzer, a dedicated application designed to simplify the identification of common controls and evidence requirements.
The tool provided a structured assessment front-end that evaluated control objectives based on specific criteria:
- Common vs. System Specific: Automatically classified whether a control was a corporate-wide requirement or specific to an individual system.
- Framework Alignment: Evaluated if a requirement was part of a minimum security baseline or unique to a specific framework.
- Subscription Model: Acted as a feeder for an automated model that allowed new systems to “subscribe” to a master library of pre-validated controls rather than recreating them from scratch.
The Impact
- Reduced Control Sprawl: Significantly lowered the volume of redundant control objectives managed across the entire organization.
- Accelerated Onboarding: Streamlined the process for bringing new systems into compliance by allowing them to inherit existing, validated common controls.
- Audit Efficiency: Minimized the “audit tax” by enabling a “test once, satisfy many” evidence collection model, saving hundreds of hours during formal assessments.
