We all awoke last week to the latest regulatory and reputational risk since names like Madoff and Snowden burst into the headline. Weekly, there are smaller local skirmishes between the behavior of companies, public officials and the prying eyes of an ever more symbiotic relationship between the press and motivated whistle blowers. It is difficult to imagine a practical preventive solution to knowledgeable individuals actively trying to circumvent well-known regulations. Much like the industry's ongoing cyber-security arms race, compliance organizations need to rethink and rebuild their detect-response operations.

Today's compliance infrastructure and operations work in a centralized, siloed, retrospective environment built upon old data, traditional batch reporting, and hope. These investments are sufficient for well-defined regulatory reporting requirements where the exact question is specified, the format the answer must take is regulated, and the organization has 60, 90, or even 180 days advance warning of when the button will be pushed and the "report" must appear. We can schedule our vacations around the regulators visit but must interrupt them when the WSJ breaks the latest whistle blower spectacular.

When these calls come, tradition dictates one of two responses. The first is to phone the IT organization and ask them to spin up a data analysis team, free up the best SQL programmers and then negotiate a re-prioritization of the existing 9-month application backlog. The second traditional approach is to identify a war-room from which to spend nights and weekends coordinating a massive, manual review of databases, contract files and other supporting systems, attempting to cross-reference the names, companies or attorneys identified in the news brief. Both of these processes continue at full speed until new workarounds are established and a new silo is created.

There is another way.

What if instead of starting with the specific report and working backward to extract, transform, move, and store regulation-specific data just because you have a regular reporting responsibility, you establish an intelligent, seamless, non-invasive compliance fabric that continually monitors corporate compliance against all known threats and regulations. When new questions or regulations arise, the compliance fabric is re-tasked to explore the newest potential threat and report back on its impact on your networks. Let's take a closer look at how this is accomplished.

The Intelligent compliance fabric is made up of a collection of special function ‘pneurons.' These pneurons, configured and connected graphically by a business analyst, work cooperatively to address all regulatory tasks without forcing the pre-integration or aggregation of data. This means that the compliance organization takes their compliance questions (analytics) directly to the source systems and source data. When new questions arise like, "Are we doing business with any entity represented by this attorney?", the fabric executes the questions over previously established connections, leverages existing matching, parsing and security capabilities, and returns the answer in less time than it took to read this blog.

The number and diversity of the reputational and compliance threats will not decrease over time. The business will continue to grow and evolve in order to stay competitive. The only strategy to enable continuous monitoring and rapid and agile response to the changing compliance landscape is to leverage newer, adaptive and rapidly adjustable technologies.