Privacy risk management software for evidence-linked risk records

Choose privacy risk management software by the evidence it keeps for each risk and the controls around reviewer approval. A practical register should link each risk back to the source DPIA question and response that produced it, score inherent and residual risk separately, track treatment with named owners and due dates, support multi-entity reporting without flattening local accountability, and export cleanly for board packs, audit and GRC systems. Acompli is built around that model: it derives the register from approved assessments, grounds every AI-drafted entry against the source text, and publishes nothing until the DPO approves it.

A risk register connects to RoPA by linking risks to the relevant processing activity, data category, system, vendor, transfer or assessment.

Evidence shows why a risk exists, what mitigation was chosen, who approved it and when it was reviewed.

There is no standalone statutory duty to keep a 'risk register' in either jurisdiction, but both regulators expect risk to be documented and acted on. Under GDPR Article 5(2) accountability (enforced by the Data Protection Commission in Ireland) and the UK GDPR (enforced by the ICO), you must be able to demonstrate how data protection risks are identified, rated and treated, and Article 35 requires the risks a DPIA surfaces to be followed up. A risk register is the practical evidence of that. Acompli builds the register from approved assessments so each entry traces to its source question, response and approval — the kind of demonstrable record the DPC and ICO look for.

Look at five things: (1) does the register link each risk back to source evidence — the DPIA question and response that produced it — or is it free-text; (2) does it score inherent and residual risk separately so you can show the value of controls; (3) does it support a tracked treatment plan with named owners, due dates and budget rather than a narrative field; (4) does it consolidate multiple legal entities for group reporting while keeping entity-level segregation; and (5) does it export to PDF, Excel and downstream GRC systems for board packs and audit committees. Acompli covers all five, with every AI-generated entry grounded against the actual assessment text and nothing published without DPO approval.

Article 35 requires a DPIA for high-risk processing, and the risks it surfaces need to be recorded, treated and monitored afterwards — which is what a risk register does. In Acompli, once a DPIA is approved, the platform analyses the whole assessment holistically and extracts structured risk entries: title, category, inherent likelihood and impact, existing controls and their effectiveness, residual likelihood and impact, suggested mitigations, and evidence links back to the source questions. The DPO accepts, adjusts or rejects each entry before publication, so the DPIA-to-register handoff is documented rather than re-keyed by hand.

Acompli derives both from the approved assessment. It scores inherent likelihood and impact (Low / Medium / High / Critical) and takes the inherent rating from their intersection, then reads the existing controls and their effectiveness (Ineffective, Partially Effective, Effective) from the assessment responses to calculate residual likelihood, impact and rating. The gap between the two shows what your controls are delivering, and residual risk that stays unacceptably high triggers treatment. Every score is grounded against the source text and presented for DPO review — the AI drafts, a human signs off.

Acompli assigns risks, treatment plans and assessments to specific legal entities — separate controllers, jurisdictions or business units — and keeps them segregated. Entity-scoped users see only their own entity's risks, while DPOs with cross-entity access view aggregate exposure across the whole group. Reporting can be filtered and exported at the entity level or consolidated across all entities, so the register matches the organisation's governance structure rather than flattening it, and risk heatmaps, status and ageing views can be filtered by legal entity for board and audit-committee packs.

Yes. Published risks export to PDF (a colour-coded register table for board packs), Excel (full register data for audit committees) and to downstream GRC systems via an external risk API. The API supports destination profiles with custom field mapping to match your GRC schema, plus filters on modified-since date, assessment, category, severity and status for incremental sync without manual export cycles. Only human-approved, published risks are exposed.

For every transfer of personal data outside the EEA, the register should capture the destination country and recipient, the Article 46 transfer mechanism in use (Standard Contractual Clauses, Binding Corporate Rules, adequacy), whether a Transfer Impact Assessment has been completed and approved, the supplementary technical and contractual measures applied (encryption, pseudonymisation, additional contractual safeguards), the residual risk after those measures and the named owner. The Court of Justice ruling in Schrems II (C-311/18) and the EDPB Recommendations 01/2020 expect that level of detail, and the DPC's EUR 1.2bn Meta decision (2023) showed what insufficient supplementary measures look like in enforcement. Where Acompli is used for both assessments and risk, the published risk entry can reference the source DPIA or TIA record for reviewer sign-off rather than making an autonomous transfer decision.

The best privacy risk management software is decided less by feature count than by whether each risk traces back to the assessment evidence that produced it, scores inherent and residual severity separately, and keeps a named human accountable for every entry. Acompli's angle is to govern these as connected, human-approved records tied to the wider GDPR and EU AI Act programme, each traceable to approved evidence. For a neutral view, our privacy risk software comparison guide and full comparison library present public-source capability charts and vendor-by-vendor breakdowns, and are honest about where competitors outdo Acompli.