Archer (RSA)

Archer, originally developed by RSA Security and now operating as an independent entity under Rockwell Automation, is one of the most established and widely recognized enterprise GRC platforms in the market. Founded in 1999 and with over two decades of development, Archer has become synonymous with enterprise-grade governance, risk, and compliance management, serving large organizations across financial services, healthcare, energy, government, and other highly regulated industries. Archer's platform provides comprehensive capabilities across integrated risk management, including operational risk management, regulatory compliance management, IT risk management, third-party governance, business resiliency, audit management, and policy management. The platform's hallmark is its extreme configurability: virtually every aspect of Archer can be customized to match an organization's specific risk taxonomy, governance structures, workflow requirements, and reporting needs without requiring code changes. This flexibility has made it the platform of choice for organizations with complex, multi-layered governance requirements. The platform's risk management capabilities are particularly mature, offering quantitative risk modeling, loss event tracking, key risk indicator monitoring, bow-tie analysis, and scenario-based risk assessment. For compliance, Archer supports multi-framework mapping, automated control testing, regulatory change management, and comprehensive audit trail documentation. Its third-party risk management module helps organizations assess and monitor vendor risk across the supply chain, an increasingly critical capability in the AI governance context. Archer's extensive history means a large installed base and a deep ecosystem of trained consultants, implementation partners, and community resources. The platform supports integration with major enterprise systems through APIs and pre-built connectors. However, Archer's long history is also reflected in its user interface, which many users find dated compared to modern cloud-native GRC platforms. The platform's extreme configurability creates significant implementation complexity, and deployments can be expensive and time-consuming. Maintenance and upgrades require dedicated technical resources, and the total cost of ownership can be substantial when accounting for implementation, customization, training, and ongoing administration.