Government, Risk, Compliance – GRC

What is GRC ? 

Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) refers to a strategy for managing an organization’s overall governance, enterprise risk management and compliance with regulations. Think of GRC as a structured approach to aligning IT with business objectives, while effectively managing risk and meeting compliance requirements.

A well-planned GRC strategy comes with lots of benefits: improved decision-making, more optimal IT investments, elimination of silos, and reduced fragmentation among divisions and departments, to name a few.

How does GRC Work ?

In the IT environment, GRC has three main components:

  • Governance: Ensuring that organizational activities, like managing IT operations, are aligned in a way that supports the organization’s business goals.
  • Risk: Making sure that any risk (or opportunity) associated with organizational activities is identified and addressed in a way that supports the organization’s business goals. In the IT context, this means having a comprehensive IT risk management process that rolls into an organization’s enterprise risk management function.
  • Compliance: Making sure that organizational activities are operated in a way that meets the laws and regulations impacting those systems. In the IT context, this means making sure that IT systems, and the data contained in those systems, are used and secured properly.

Why Do Companies need GRC ? 

GRC can be implemented by any organization – public or private, large or small – that wants to align its IT activities to its business goals, manage risk effectively and stay on top of compliance.

Once organizations started managing compliance, risk, and governance through ERP tools a new fact came into light. Organizations realized that risk, compliance, and governance were intrinsically linked. They were managing three separate things when they should have been managing them together. The key thing to understand is that the goals of risk management, compliance, and governance are the same.

GRC isn’t becoming popular because it is a fad or a trend – GRC’s popularity is because of the ROI it delivers. Managing risk, compliance, and governance with GRC technology removes redundant processes and tasks which results in reduced costs. The latest GRC solution also incorporate automation and artificial intelligence into the system which speeds up and automates processes. Tasks that used to take hours can now be completed in minutes, because all the required information and data is already available in one system. Monitoring is also automated – issues get detected and notifications are sent out automatically.

What Tools do GRC use ?

An IT GRC solution enables you to create and coordinate policies and controls and map them to regulatory and internal compliance requirements. These solutions, which are usually cloud-based, introduce automation for many processes, which increases efficiency and reduces complexity.

  • RSA Archer Platform
  • IBM OpenPages GRC Platform
  • MetricStream
  • Rsam’s Enterprise GRC

You also need to create a GRC framework (NCA) ?. Although GRC tends to focus heavily on IT, implementing a strategy involves an entire organization, and requires a hard look at all of the people and processes that will be affected.

What are GRC professional Certifications ? 

All kinds of job roles require or benefit from a GRC certification, including CIO, IT security analyst, security engineer or architect, information assurance program manager and senior IT auditor, among others.

Here are our top picks for GRC certifications:

  • Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control (CRISC)
  • Certified in the Governance of Enterprise IT (CGEIT)
  • Certification in Risk Management Assurance (CRMA)
  • GRC Professional (GRCP)