
What Is Continuous Compliance + How To Achieve It
Read articleToday’s organizations face a range of intricate challenges. Changing regulations, emerging technologies, and complex processes make governance, risk, and compliance strategies more important than ever.
What is governance, risk, and compliance?
GRC refers to an organization’s strategy for managing risk and maintaining regulatory compliance while meeting its goals.
It requires buy-in and collaboration from several teams, including compliance, legal, finance, IT, HR, the executive suite, and the board.
By bringing people together across departments, organizations can improve processes, open lines of communication, and prepare for success.
The idea of GRC was first established by the Open Compliance and Ethics Group (OCEG) in 2003. At its heart, the goal of GRC is to align an entire organization on risk management and compliance to keep the company safe and able to meet its goals.
You can think of GRC as a three-legged stool, where governance, risk, and compliance are all necessary to manage and guide an organization.
By focusing on each principle, an organization can increase efficiency and meet its goals.
Governance is the rules, business processes, and policies that steer an organization. It begins with leadership and helps guide operations and administration, ethics, enterprise risk management, compliance, and more.
Governance ensures all stakeholders’ interests are balanced and gives leaders a framework to help them make decisions that align with the organization’s objectives.
Risk refers to the more day-to-day, technical processes that are in place to mitigate and monitor risk.
This involves conducting audits and assessments to monitor risks both within your organization and with third-party vendors and suppliers.
Compliance is the steps a company takes to meet standards and regulations to run safely and legally. This includes the due diligence required for cybersecurity frameworks such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001, data privacy legislation like GDPR and HIPAA, and industry requirements such as PCI DSS.
What Is Continuous Compliance + How To Achieve It
Read articleNot having a GRC strategy can increase reputational and strategic risks. Not to mention companies that violate standards or regulations could face fines in the millions. Below are a few other drivers of GRC.
Why do companies need a GRC strategy?
GRC expert Michael Rasmussen says it's because they operate in "distributed, dynamic, and disruptive" environments.
Rasmussen notes that even small risks can snowball into major problems if they’re not well understood or managed correctly. Organizations must be able to identify individual risks and understand how they may affect objectives and performance. Doing so will build the operational resiliency that's crucial in today’s ever-changing business climate.
The introduction of virtual work brings new user access risks, leading to more sophisticated cyber attacks.
Plus, as organizations outsource work to vendors, this also creates the need for a strategic approach to vetting and monitoring vendor activity.
Additionally, organizations are generating an increasing amount of data. A recent report found that 79% of GRC professionals say it is “extremely,” “very,” or “somewhat” challenging to get the data they need to do their job.
A GRC strategy outlines data collection and data privacy duties and fosters an environment where information is shared across departments to improve management processes.
Developing a GRC approach addresses all of these aspects that impact an organization’s risk terrain, setting them up to hit business goals, manage and reduce risk, and stay compliant with industry standards and regulations.
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Read articleGRC is important because it combines corporate governance, risk, and compliance functions into one single strategy.
Each area of GRC includes its own set of rules, regulations, and responsibilities, making it easy for organizations to lose sight of how the three are related.
Instead of thinking of GRC as something that one department or person “owns,” GRC can be thought of as an organization-wide philosophy.
The problems related to governance, risk, and compliance — such as fragmentation, poor integration, and wasted information — are nothing new. What makes a GRC approach unique is that it’s a way for organizations to identify, tackle, and reduce these issues.
This involves stakeholders across the company working together to achieve sustainability and efficiency.
Rather than keeping the elements of governance, risk, and compliance siloed, a forward-thinking GRC strategy recognizes the overlap between these three elements and fosters collaboration between teams.
The benefits of a GRC framework are wide-reaching and include:
Whether you would like to strengthen your current GRC strategy or are looking to create one, these steps will help get you started. But just like no two businesses are identical, no two GRC strategies will be the same, either.
Here are five steps to help guide you:
Ready to implement your own GRC strategy? Download this quick reference sheet with step-by-step implementation instructions and a handy list of do’s and don'ts to ensure a successful roll-out.
Implement your own GRC strategy using this reference sheet with step-by-step instructions.
Developing a GRC strategy is a journey, not a one-and-done task to be checked off a list. It takes time and hefty data collection along the way.
For organizations just beginning to rethink their GRC approach, it’s helpful to determine where your organization lands on the GRC maturity spectrum. Created by OCEG in 2016 and since expanded, this model serves as a benchmark for planning and executing a GRC program.
Gauging the success of your GRC strategy with clearly defined metrics will help your organization deliver on outcomes and hit goals.
Three areas to monitor when tracking a GRC program’s effectiveness are:
There are many success metrics you could use to measure your GRC approach, but here are a few to consider:
It may seem overwhelming to implement a cohesive GRC strategy. Still, industry experts have many tips that can help make it a smoother process.
Here are a few of those ideas:
Technology is key to helping organizations achieve their GRC objectives and save time through automation. And while GRC is more than just software, digital tools can help companies streamline processes and identify gaps.
Here are a few key aspects to consider when shopping for GRC software:
You’ll also want tools that include:
Secureframe helps companies achieve and maintain security by streamlining the compliance process.
Our tools save teams hours and headaches by automating hundreds of tasks through seamless workflows. Automating redundant tasks relieves pressure on team members and minimizes the risk of human error.
Using a platform like Secureframe makes it easy for teams to get compliant or implement best-in-class security programs. We help you build trust and stay secure.
We also pair organizations with security experts to help answer questions along the way as you build out your GRC program. Find out more about how we can improve your organization's GRC capability by requesting a demo today.