Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC)
Introduction
Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) is a structured way to align IT with business goals while managing risks and meeting all industry and government regulations.
Companies use GRC to achieve organizational goals reliably, remove uncertainty, and meet compliance requirements. It includes tools and processes to unify an organization’s governance and risk management with its technological innovation and adoption.
Combining ‘Governance’, ‘Risk’, and ‘Compliance’
Most businesses are familiar with these 3 terms, but routinely have practiced them separately. GRC combines these 3 terms into one coordinated model. Doing so improves efficiency while reducing risk and wastage.
Governance
Governance is the set of rules, policies, and processes that ensures corporate activities are aligned to support business goals. It encompasses ethics, resource management, accountability, and management controls.
Effective governance creates an environment where employees feel empowered and behaviors and resources are controlled and well-coordinated.
Risk Management
Risk management is the process of identifying, assessing, and controlling financial, legal, strategic, and security risks to an organization. To reduce risk, an organization needs to apply resources to minimize, monitor, and control the impact of negative events while maximizing positive events.
By focusing attention on risk and committing the necessary resources to control and mitigate risk, a business will protect itself from uncertainty, reduce costs, and increase the likelihood of business continuity and success.
Compliance
Compliance involves adhering to rules, policies, standards, and laws set forth by industries and/or government agencies. Failing to do so could cost an organization in terms of poor performance, costly mistakes, fines, penalties, and lawsuits.
Regulatory compliance covers external laws, regulations, and industry standards that apply to the company.
Using a GRC framework
A GRC framework helps organizations establish policies and practices to minimize compliance risk. An organization’s GRC program should also improve efficiencies, and increase performance & ROI (return on investment).
Developing a GRC framework involves correlating information in the context of business processes, policies, and controls, as well as activities carried out by IT, finance, HR teams, and C-suite executives.
GRC Tools
GRC tools are a way to manage operations and ensure a company is meeting compliance and risk standards. GRC tools can also help determine and mitigate risks associated with use, ownership, operation, involvement, influence, and adoption of IT within a company.
GRC tools should encompass operational risk, policy and compliance, IT governance, and internal auditing. Most GRC tools have some of the following features:
- Content and document management — that helps businesses create, track, and store digitized content
- Risk data management and analytics — that help to measure, quantify, and predict risk—and determine steps to reduce it
- Workflow management — to help companies establish, execute, and monitor GRC-related workflows
- Audit management — to organize information and simplify processes for conducting internal audits
- A dashboard — that provides a central interface where key performance indicators relevant to business processes and objectives can be monitored in real-time
Effective GRC tools create and distribute policies and controls and map them to regulations and compliance requirements. They help assess whether controls have been deployed, are functioning correctly, and are improving risk assessment and mitigation.
Source: https://academy.tcm-sec.com/p/grc