What is GRC? It is an umbrella term for a collection of systems and guidelines designed to help businesses meet their business objectives, manage risk, and behave with integrity. Everyday life should be infused with good business processes. That is the goal of GRC (Governance, Risk Management & Compliance. As risks became more numerous, complicated, and destructive, GRC became more important.
Today, GRC encompasses a wide range of disciplines, including risk management, accountability, third-party risk assessment, compliance control, and others. While each discipline has its own set of goals and mostly its very own way to do things. GRC leaders are beginning to see the value of sharing data and insight to generate better results and create a stronger, more resilient company.
What Exactly Is GRC – In Research and Practice?
GRC is composed of three main components:
- Governance entails aligning procedures and activities with the institution’s business objectives.
- Risk Management includes understanding and mitigating all of the agency’s hazards.
- Compliance clearly signifies that all actions adhere to regulatory and legal standards.
Historically, businesses treated “Governance, Risk, and Compliance” as distinct tasks. Processes or systems were frequently developed in reaction to a single event — for example, new legislation, litigation, a data breach, or an audit finding – with little attention given to how that event fit into the larger picture. As a result, there was a tangle of inefficiencies, redundancies, and errors, such as:
- Inadequate understanding of the entire risk landscape
- Actions that contradict each other
- Unnecessary complication
- Reluctance to assess the risk’s cascading repercussions
In fact, there is a lot of overlap between GRC. Each of disciplinary boundaries generates information that is useful to the other two – and all three have an influence on the same techniques, individuals, procedures, and data. For example, a company may be subject to a new data-privacy legislation (a compliance activity) while simultaneously adhering to specific internal data-protection procedures (a governance activity), both of which assist minimize cyber risk (risk management activity).
When the three GRC fields are managed individually, there is significant job duplication. Multiple teams wind up spending hours gathering this very same data — and many more hours trying to untangle email threads and spreadsheets simply to start analyzing it.
More harmful, fragmented procedures and a lack of transparency blind the company to insights and interrelationships across risks, weakening the whole system by enabling holes and redundancy in controls to go undetected. Siloed teams also have little awareness of how their specific area influences the company’s overall risk posture or performance.
In brief, maintaining GRC in silos requires a lot more effort – and that effort yields very little benefit. It is almost difficult to discover problems and discrepancies without an integrated picture of all GRC-related operations. A harmful danger can easily go unnoticed and ignored since you could not assess the full extent of the damage until it was far too late.
Why Is GRC Necessary in Your Organization?
Organizations are operating in a fast changing and increasingly complicated business environment. Whether you work for a major corporation, a government agency, a growing enterprise, or a non-profit, you will encounter a variety of obstacles, including:
- Regulations and enforcement are always changing, which has a negative influence on corporate operations.
- Stakeholders expect high performance, consistent growth, and transparent processes.
- Increasing expenses of meeting compliance standards and risk management
- An increase in third-party connections, as well as the related governance problems
- Potential financial and legal ramifications of ineffective monitoring and failure to recognize key threats
A chaotic approach to GRC may slow down a company and increase costs all while accomplishing less, failing to meet required compliance standards, and incorrectly labeled dangers to income or reputation.
What is the process of GRC?
“According to Joanna Grama, director of cyber security and IT GRC programs, businesses create a GRC foundation for the administration, organization, and management of their IT areas to ensure that they support and allow the organization’s strategic goals. The framework defines measurable that shed insight on the efficacy of an organization’s GRC initiatives.
Even though there are many solid software solutions to assist simplify GRC processes, GRC is more than a collection of software tools”.
Rather of building one from start, many businesses consider a procedure for help in making and maintaining their GRC operations. Standards and procedures serve as making block that companies may customize to their own needs. “COBIT, COSO, and ITIL”, according to Grama, are major actors in a variety of sectors.
What is GRC Tool or Solution?
You may use an “IT GRC solution to establish and coordinate policies and controls, as well as connect them to regulatory and internal compliance needs. These technologies, which are typically cloud-based, automate numerous operations, increasing efficiency and reducing complexity”.
“There are several GRC solutions available on the market. Highly ranked solutions include IBM OpenPages GRC Platform, MetricStream, and Rsam’s Enterprise GRC”. They do, however, come at a high cost. “There are more affordable and even free options available, but they may lack the comprehensive feature sets of higher-priced rivals.
You must first prepare your environment before looking at any software solution. This entails analyzing your firm’s risk and investigating controls. Do you have appropriate safeguards in place. Are the present controls effective. Add controls where they are needed and repair any that are not performing as expected”.
You must develop a GRC framework. Although GRC is often associated with IT, adopting a plan includes the whole business and necessitates a thorough examination of all the people and processes that will be impacted.
What is piquing people’s interest in GRC?
The risk landscape today is more complex, unpredictable, and interrelated than ever before. One risk, such as a safety and health concern, might have ramifications for the distribution network, business process, business partnerships, IT security, productivity growth, and other areas. Around the same time, a number of forces are altering the risk landscape, including:
- Increasing the speed and scope of regulatory compliance
Almost every company in every business is confronted with an ever-increasing and ever-changing set of laws with which they must comply.
- Improving risk management digitalization
The sharing economy, third parties, block chain technology, each clear element of access adds fragility and exponentially raises danger.
- Risk management is becoming increasingly important in business strategy
Risk management is usually seen as more than merely a tactical role, but as an important component of business strategy.
- Analytics are becoming more sophisticated
Improved analytics are providing new degrees of clarity for data-driven operations.
The impact of social media, the continual danger of cyber-attacks, and demands for greater openness are all increasing the pressure on CEOs and boards to make risk-adverse choices at a rapid speed with little margin for mistake. In turn, senior executives are depending on a growing number of stakeholders from across the company to detect, monitor, and minimize risk.
Leaders must be able to obtain information quickly in order to guide the organization toward success – and then utilize those data to inform their reaction. A holistic GRC strategy can lead the way by breaking down silos and fostering cooperation, allowing for faster, more exact, and more concrete effort.
