Article

AI governance with IBM OpenPages as a Service on AWS

Clients can now take advantage of a unified, AI-driven governance, risk, and compliance solution

By

Neil Leblanc,

Sanjay Doiphode,

Christie Yeh

This article provides an overview of IBM OpenPages as a Service on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It articulates aspects of IBM’s point of view on enterprise governance, and illustrates how clients can simplify governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) with their AI workloads in the AWS cloud. At the end of the article, we provide links to several resources to accelerate our clients' journey into IBM OpenPages and the IBM / AWS Partnership.

Enterprise AI governance

With artificial intelligence (AI) adoption accelerating due to the incredible potential of generative AI and foundation models, we are seeing clients increasingly concerned with AI governance. We hear from our clients that there are five key pillars of AI trust: explainability, fairness, robustness, transparency, and privacy.

IBM is at the forefront of global effort to hold AI to high ethical standards through our practices and pillars, including governance, ethics by design, methods and tools, and partnerships. We hold ethics in high regard, as demonstrated by our advocacy for precision regulation for AI and targeted support for policies that would increase the responsibilities for companies to develop and operate trustworthy AI.

IBM supports the Rome Call for AI Ethics, which seeks to create a shared sense of responsibility among businesses, governments, universities, and other organizations to create a future in which humankind is at the center of all technology development. As a firm, IBM opposes and will not condone use of any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose that is not consistent with our values and principles of trust and transparency.

Simplify risk management and regulatory compliance

The need to take on risk with confidence is greater than ever before. Organizations of all shapes and sizes are struggling with rapidly changing business conditions, new regulatory obligations, and the extra time and resources required to remain compliant. In a recent study, 9 out of 10 compliance leaders expect evolving business, regulatory, and customer demands to increase compliance-related operating costs by up to 30%. According to the IBM Institute of Business Value, 79% of organizations report that keeping up with the speed of digital and other transformations is a significant risk management challenge. Finally, 67% of executives say that they are concerned about the potential liabilities of AI.

IBM is committed to giving its clients the ability to run their GRC solutions in their cloud of choice. In our discussions with our AWS clients, they have articulated three critical capabilities needed for AI governance, risk, and compliance, including model monitoring and evaluation, fact and metrics tracking, and lifecycle management and risk.

To address the importance of managing lifecycle risk, IBM OpenPages is an AI-driven, highly scalable GRC solution that runs on any cloud with IBM Cloud Pak for Data. OpenPages enables you to centralize siloed risk management functions within a single environment, one that's designed to help you identify, manage, monitor, and report on risk and regulatory compliance.

IBM OpenPages provides our clients with the best-in-class risk management tools they need, and ensures they receive automatic updates on model metrics and have an enterprise-wide view of model risk.

IBM OpenPages as a Service on AWS

OpenPages product page

Figure 1: IBM OpenPages product page

Today, at AWS re:Invent, we are excited to inform our customers that IBM OpenPages as a Service is generally available as an IBM fully managed SaaS on AWS. Clients can now take advantage of a fully unified, smarter GRC solution backed by the scale, agility, and cost-efficiency of AWS. IBM OpenPages as a Service is now available to purchase through IBM and our Business Partners.

IBM OpenPages as a Service on AWS allows our clients to operationalize AI workflows, and increase efficiency and accuracy at scale. Clients can access automated, scalable GRC tools that span operational risk, policy, compliance, financial management, IT governance and internal/external audits. They can proactively detect and mitigate model risk and translate AI regulations into enforceable policies for automatic enforcement.

What is OpenPages as a Service?

Organizations recognize the importance of having a clear GRC strategy to achieve their organizational objectives, address risks, and maintain compliance. OpenPages provides a set of core services and functional components that span multiple non-financial risk domains.

With OpenPages as a Service, clients gain the ability to deploy 11 domain-targeted product modules to meet specific risk and compliance challenges on a scalable platform, as described in the following image:

OpenPages domain-targeted modules Figure 2: Domain-targeted product modules

What are the benefits?

Organizations that implement OpenPages can gain:

  • Fast performance, scalability, and flexibility: Instantly provision an enterprise-grade GRC solution with near-zero downtime upgrades and industry-standard SLAs that can scale with your business as you increase the number of solutions or the number of users, all without impacting performance.
  • Expertise with AI: Obtain 24/7 support with a GRC virtual assistant, and promote accuracy and efficiency in incident reporting with AI-relevant classifications.
  • Predictive insights: Obtain insights into the state of risk across your organization with dynamic dashboards, charts, and dimensional reporting.
  • Third-party integrations: Achieve data integration with IBM App Connect and comprehensive REST APIs that integrate GRC processes with third-party connectors.
  • Workflow automation: Automate GRC processes in minutes and enhance time-to-value with configurable workflows. New options include drag-and-drop functionality and workflow variables.

Latest enhancements

IBM OpenPages 9.0.0 is packed with new features and improvements, including expanded capabilities with AI. Your organization can now integrate your own custom machine learning models into the system to create a seamless AI-infused GRC experience for your users. Improvements include:

  • Custom machine learning model integration: Empower first-line business users to complete tasks more confidently, efficiently, and accurately by integrating your organization's trained AI models directly into OpenPages. Once mapped, these customized models will generate insights to your first-line business users within the context of their assignments.
  • AI-Powered insights: Business users can now benefit from AI-powered insights and suggestions while working on their tasks. Learn more about how your organization can take advantage of integrating custom AI models to streamline decision making for first-line users.
  • New filtering capabilities: You can now filter for any value, null values, ancestors, or descendants. The new shared relationship path filtering feature enables an administrator to limit the records available for association or a copy recursive action.
  • Questionnaire enhancements: The new questionnaire can be dynamic – questions can be based on a previous question’s answer (across sections) as well as attributes on other assets. This allows users to only ask relevant questions based on context.
  • Workflow enhancements: Several enhancements have been made to help you administer, maintain, and support workflows such as Custom Error Messages and Workflow stage auto advance.

IBM OpenPages key capabilities

Figure 3: IBM OpenPages key capabilities

IBM OpenPages reference architecture

The following diagram provides a detailed look at the OpenPages architecture:

IBM OpenPages reference architecture

Figure 4: IBM OpenPages reference architecture

  1. Business users first access the IBM Cloud catalog to provision the OpenPages service instance. A series of multi-tenant micro-services handle the interaction to the IBM Cloud catalog/UI to provide provisioning/deprovisioning/management flow, which is described at the high level on the Control Plane column of the diagram.
  2. The control plane consists of the following components:
    • Service Broker
    • Console UI
    • Resource Inventory Manager
    • Operator
  3. When the service instance is requested, the control plane deploys a per-tenant OpenPages instance that consists of:
    • Application Server Deployment on OpenShift cluster
    • IAM synchronization and hyperwarp service on OpenShift cluster
    • Oracle RDS
    • S3 bucket
    • RabbitMQ exchange

Summary and next steps

In this article, you've seen how IBM OpenPages as a Service on AWS can help you manage your GRC requirements. OpenPages gives you an extensible, fully configurable, integrated risk management solution, backed by the scale, agility and cost-efficiency of AWS.

To help you get started with IBM OpenPages as a Service on AWS check out the following resources:

IBM | AWS partnership

With Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM, unleash the transformative value of generative AI in your business with greater speed, scale and trust. The IBM, AWS, and Red Hat partnership brings a unique combination of leading enterprise AI, cloud, infrastructure, and open-source technologies delivered with deep IBM consulting expertise. This enables companies to quickly and responsibly scale AI workloads using a comprehensive stack of generative AI, composed of Amazon Bedrock and IBM watsonx running on AWS Cloud and across hybrid cloud environments.

Learn more about the IBM / AWS partnership.


*IBM’s statements regarding its plans, directions, and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice at IBM’s sole discretion.