Empower 2025 Recap: The Compliance Trap
August 1, 2025
3 min read
August 1, 2025
3 min read
In June 2025, our CIO and Co-Founder, Rowan O’Donoghue and Global Senior Regulatory Affairs Strategist, Jackie Campbell, took to the Empower 2025 stage to discuss the potential pitfalls of compliance. The main point of discussion was around how many vendors weaponize compliance to drain your business’s budget, stopping your ability to grow and innovate in its tracks.
Through concepts like over-compliance, compliance regulations beyond what is actually necessary for your business, OEM vendors can vastly increase support costs for businesses. They can also utilize this tactic to keep customers in long-term, costly contracts with audit threats.
These common tactics keep businesses locked in a loop of budget, resources and time being focused in places other than innovation, keeping them from reaching their true potential. However, compliance when aligned correctly with actual requirements can free up your budget and improve agility.
Our expert panelists discussed how going beyond regulatory requirements and adhering to unnecessary internal policies can cost your business in the long-term. “A lot of organisations are over-engineering their regulation policies and that’s restricting them from innovating.” stated Jackie Campbell.
Many vendors introduce painfully strict internal policies around compliance in order to gouge customers for more money. This tactic only benefits the vendor, and results in customers being forced to deal with increased costs, innovation bottlenecks and reduced agility.
These ‘self-imposed’ limits often creep into a business’s thinking from several different sources. Historical fear of audits or litigation, misinterpretations of legal/IT security guidance and “set it and forget it” policies that no longer reflect today’s environment all play a part in the increase in over-compliance in modern business.
Much of this increase in over-compliance can be attributed to the current trend of fear-based leadership in many businesses. A ‘just-in-case’ attitude has been adopted by so many CEO’s and this overly cautious approach to software systems is costing them. Rather than looking at what they should be doing, many businesses are simply being told what they can do in regards to compliance. There is a huge difference between compliance for compliance sake and true risk management.
Rowan and Jackie discussed in-depth the difference between external regulations and internal controls. Specifically how there is no compliance rule that forces customers to upgrade or use OEM security patches, tactics often used by vendors to drive up costs or keep customers trapped in support contracts. As Rowan O’Donoghue stated during the session “More often than not, customers are more upgrading in order to meet ‘requirements’ rather than needing to.”. Thankfully expert, independent knowledge can help you address these concerns through an audit of your current systems and re-aligning your internal policies with actual compliance requirements.
Perhaps the most important takeaway from the entire session is the fact that you have the power to actively address these compliance issues for your business. You can do this by taking a few simple steps to start your journey to improved growth and innovation today.
This will help ensure you control your compliance needs, rather than the other way around.
If you’re struggling to control your compliance, then independent software support could be the answer. In the session it’s clearly outlined how Origina provides software maintenance and support to help companies address their compliance concerns. With Origina you can extend the life of your software while maintaining compliant controls, avoid OEM-imposed upgrade cycles that force risky changes and support compliance without compromising stability or security.
Through independent software maintenance and support with Origina you can enable your business to break free of vendor driven agendas. Addressing this issue can swiftly get your business back on track and help it to innovate and grow the way it should.
The true danger of self-imposed limits in regard to compliance is the shackles that it surrounds your business with. You can quickly find yourself trapped in an endless loop of costly contracts and unending upgrades.
However, you can free yourself from these shackles. As Rowan puts it “If you don’t challenge the norm, there’s a danger you could get outpaced by your competitors.”. At Origina, our goal is to encourage leadership to embrace compliance as a tool—not a cage. Independent maintenance and support is your key to freeing yourself from the compliance trap.
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