Introduction to GRC

GRC stands for governance, risk, and compliance. It is a strategy for integrating an organization's management of its governance, risk, and compliance initiatives with regulations. Experts think of GRC as a structured approach to aligning information technology with business objectives while effectively managing risk and meeting compliance requirements. GRC allows a company to run efficiently by synchronizing people, data, and activities across divisions and departments.

Importance of GRC

A GRC strategy can help decision-making and improve a company's operations, including enhanced collaboration and visibility into a business's governance, assurance, and performance. It can also assist with managing security, quality, ethics, and values and support business continuity. Consider the three processes of GRC -

• Governance is about an organization's policies, rules, and processes dictating corporate behaviour and management.
• Risk management involves effective and cost-efficient mitigation of risks that can hinder internal operations or the organization's ability to remain competitive.
• Compliance is a process that involves ensuring everyone in the organization follows the applicable regulations, standards, laws, and ethical practices.

A good example of the importance of GRC in a company is managing its confidential and sensitive data. This data can be generated by a company or shared by its customers. Some GRC efforts regarding that data could include implementing internal data protection standards (governance) and adhering to cybersecurity regulations (compliance). When such governance and compliance measures are in place, a company can mitigate or manage security incidences such as data breaches (risk management).

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Who uses GRC?

GRC is driven by the fact that organizations must deal with several demands and challenges in today's business climate. For instance, stakeholders want high transparency and performance levels, while huge cost implications are involved in meeting the business sector's dynamic and predictable regulations and enforcement. Management faces several major challenges regarding risks associated with the growth of third-party relationships and the harsh impact on a company that has not identified its opportunities and threats.

Whether the organization is small or large, private, or public, GRC can help it stay on top of its objectives and programs. GRC touches multiple stakeholders, such as business executives, finance managers, legal counsels, and IT firms. helps identify and manage risk, meet regulatory and compliance requirements, discover, and retain company records, and manage company-wide, GRC-related software installations for these stakeholders. GRC strategies span the entire company, which connotes the need to manage and coordinate GRC tools and policies across the relevant stakeholders.

It can monitor user access and privileges to alert administrators when such access or actions violate compliance regulations and requirements. It can also flag any suspicious activity, including fraud.

With buy-in from all stakeholders and intelligent automation, a forward-thinking strategy can lead to a successful GRC implementation, helping companies achieve their business objectives, act with integrity, and address uncertainty.

What are the tools in GRC?

There are various tools to manage and coordinate GRC programs at various levels of sophistication. They can help users map the controls and policies they create to internal and regulatory compliance requirements, facilitate workflows, and monitor the overall risk profile of the entire organization. GRC tools that include intelligence automation and artificial intelligence (AI) can further help stakeholders become more efficient and productive by facilitating and automating the implementation and handling of GRC.

Manual processes involving spreadsheets and legal pads can slow down GRC and lead to duplication, inconsistencies, and errors. Intelligent automation can reduce or eliminate those issues by putting the work in the hands of software bots. An intelligent GRC solution can integrate processes, the enterprise, and automate routine audit and compliance business processes to reduce or eliminate the risk of malicious activity or fraud in the company's enterprise resource planning (ERP) or SAP systems.

What are the benefits of GRC automation?

As IT organizations become advanced, bigger, and more complex, GRC automation makes greater sense. It provides a systematic, predictable, and easy-to-manage environment for all GRC issues. A GRC automation framework can handle many more transactions, provide greater analysis of GRC metrics and issue alerts when those metrics exceed normal performance boundaries. Let us explore some more benefits of GRC automation.

• Complete customization - GRC management tools provide a fully customizable approach to identify, measure, and remediate risk across the business while ensuring compliance with internal rules and external regulations. By leveraging a software solution, users can populate an evergreen data inventory with individualized analytical grids, custom fields, and custom views.
• 24/7 automation - Can you confidently say your team has kept up with each of the regulatory updates that have been enacted? GRC management tools stay up to date with regulations while reducing the need for manual data entry. These tools are dynamic, in that they can track your obligations, help flag compliance gaps, and automate action supported by flexible workflows. These capabilities help to increase your team’s productivity and eliminate the likelihood of human error.
• Smooth onboarding & integration - Fear of a difficult adoption process and complicated implementations are common concerns among companies looking to adopt an enterprise GRC tool. Any modern GRC automation tool should not only provide your organization with a step-by-step onboarding process but also the necessary resources to get started. From webinars to detailed tutorials, certified support, and training, your onboarding journey is designed to be as smooth as possible. Additionally, modern GRC management tools are built to break down silos and provide users with a unified interface for managing compliance data across teams.
• Proper visibility & management - Unlike spreadsheets, compliance tools make it easy for all parties involved in the compliance process to collaborate within the platform. It also enhances your team’s project management capabilities, with integrated task management to track compliance activities, set deadlines, and monitor activity in an auditable format.
• Real-time reporting & monitoring - Gone are the days of waiting for your team to finish their tasks before running a report, analyzing the data, and delivering comprehensive insights. Businesses today operate at an unprecedented speed and scale and require timely insights into operations and compliance standings. Compliance tools have dynamic dashboards and reporting capabilities. Backed by the automation and integrated data sets mentioned above, they update in real-time for executive level insights into operational activities.
• Data & security - You can save the same instance of a spreadsheet to multiple users’ computers at the same time. This creates a headache to validate the most up-to-date information and opens multiple channels of vulnerabilities through non-existent version control leaving them highly exposed to cybersecurity threats. This is not the case with GRC tools. Thanks to encrypted data storage and secure data transfers, compliance tools are a more secure way of managing your GRC process.
• Cost-effective - Effective GRC software reduces compliance costs. A benchmark compliance study found organizations that enabled compliance technology is affordable. There is no denying it. It is time to bid goodbye your gigantic spreadsheet. Search for a GRC tool that offers a suite of products to identify, measure, mitigate, monitor, and report risk across business operations and can deliver truly integrated GRC function for core requirements across risk, policy, and audit management.

What are the challenges with GRC automation?

While there is a plethora of problems organizations face with current GRC processes and tools, we will see some top challenges experienced across multiple industries and organizations –

Too many manual processes continue to persist

Current GRC processes and tools have forced analysts to look to manual processes and disparate tools to find insights, an inefficiency that has rendered enterprises unable to meet compliance mandates. There are a variety of complex business processes supporting business operations that are closely linked to multiple IT systems, some of which may still be manual. 

Risk and compliance groups are bogged down by archaic processes, with GRC documentation distributed across spreadsheets, emails, phone calls, and various other tools. This has amplified the risk of lack of accountability and follow through and, subsequently, a lack of visibility to ongoing GRC management.

It is alarming that the organization is unaware of who is reviewing what and what actions are being taken. No audit trail may lead to fabrication or deception. Manual GRC processes do not provide any kind of intelligence. Analyzing, reporting, and making sense of large sets of data collected from manual processes to derive relevant insights requires time and is prone to error.

Addressing demands from governments and regulatory organizations

One thing is certain, risk and compliance mandates are here to stay, even as government regulators seek to exert control upon organizational practices through stricter compliance requirements.

While most organizations have a risk and compliance group to address this ongoing demand, it is important to note that compliance is, in fact, an organization-wide responsibility. Even if one department or business does not comply with requisite standards, it will affect the entire organization. It is, therefore, essential to embed compliance into every business unit and the culture across the organization.

This means specific policies and processes must be established to address compliance consistently across the organization. Efforts should be made to keep a steady link to GRC so new regulations can be immediately integrated across all business processes. A flexible GRC framework also helps you to be better prepared to meet the requirements of changing regulations.

Lack of a comprehensive GRC framework

Businesses running fast and successfully have been able to do so because they have taken the time to develop a flexible and comprehensive GRC framework. As business opportunities evolve, so do regulations.

When business units seem solid on the surface but not adequately integrated, it further complicates developing a well-crafted, comprehensive GRC framework. While it is true that every department or business unit has its own goals to achieve and needs to address, there also needs to be a close alignment between these processes and the overall organizational goals.

It is also important to define a strategy that brings all this relevant, insightful data together and prioritizes critical tasks and high-impact audit activities to enable enterprises to make well-informed risk management decisions and mitigate exposure to incidents that cause loss or risk.

Lack of alignment between the business work culture and GRC 

The culture of governance will have to start with top-level executives. They must transform the corporate culture to take risk and compliance management seriously. This will require an organization-wide initiative to educate, embrace change and obtain buy-in from all stakeholders. Information should be disseminated across the organization to achieve buy-in at all levels.

While working towards developing a robust and flexible GRC strategy is crucial, ensuring it is implemented at all levels is even more crucial. While businesses may not cause a drastic shift in mindsets overnight, setting the right processes in motion will be critical in changing the status quo. As organizations increasingly seek to implement GRC strategies to drive accountability, security, efficiency, and visibility, we also understand that getting started with GRC can be challenging.

How can businesses address the challenges in GRC automation tools?

Here are a few suggestions for businesses go address the challenges that come with GRC automation tools and ensure an effective enterprise-wide GRC journey to manage uncertainty - ·       

• Adopt a proactive approach to monitoring critical controls - While much time is spent on managing risk requirements, there is a glaring lack of focus on ensuring that critical controls are monitored carefully. This will help enterprises be adequately prepared to address new, high-impact risks.
• Prepare for change management - Complying with a rapidly increasing set of regulations can seem overwhelming. Therefore, you must embed GRC into your corporate culture. Change management ensures success by aligning corporate culture to governance, compliance, and risk management. And this must start with the top management.·       
• Risk assessment - Before shopping for software solutions, you must assess and monitor your organization's risks. Based on your analysis, evaluate if sufficient controls are in place, how they work, and if you need to add or modify any. You will then have to create the GRC framework. The focus should not just be on IT but on the people and processes involved as well.       
• Find the right integrations - Consider implementing integrations that can help increase the efficacy of your GRC programs. These will enable you to manage risk more proactively through automation and by bringing data from multiple silo tools and stakeholders into one location.·       
• Find the right partner - Consider partnering with a vendor that can provide effective assessment and recommendations for GRC challenges and help streamline compliance, risk, audit, and vendor risk. Be sure that they can convert evidence collection and remediation tasks into structured response engines that use intelligent workflows, automation, and IT connections.

Conclusion

Organizations are looking for a robust GRC program to enable them to manage compliance with regulations and internal policies, improve information security practices and streamline audits and remediation activities. As regulations continue to mount, there is a constant barrage of new guidelines to adhere to and new initiatives being pushed forth to mitigate risk. Risk and compliance groups are finding it daunting to keep up. There is also the challenge of growing cyber security threats, further contributing to the adaptation of GRC.

FAQs

1. What is GRC?

GRC stands for Governance Risk Compliance. It lets you automate your global trade transactions, manage large numbers of business partners and documents, and ensure that your company always complies with constantly changing international legal regulations.

2. What are the major components of GRC?

The major components of SAP Governance Risk Compliance include compliance management, customs management, risk management

3. What are the advantages of using GRC?

The primary advantages of using GRC include less manual effort, less investment in time, effort, capital, and other resources and automatic checking of the compliance violation and banned dealers

4. What are the things businesses can achieve with the help of GRC?

Some things that can be achieved with the help of GRC include reduced risks of trade penalties and fines, boost in productivity and streamlining of all trade processes for improved international operations, elimination of all the manual tasks with the help of automated tools and better customer satisfaction and protection of the company’s brand name.

5. What is ERP?

ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning Software. It is an integrated computer-based system used to manage a company’s resources effectively. It ensures smooth information amongst various departments in an enterprise or a company and manages workflows.

6. What is the difference between ERP and GRC?

While GRC functions as a place to store and organize all your interactions with suppliers, ERP focuses on increasing your business’ overall efficiency.

7. Why is GRC important?

GRC is important because it streamlines and improves processes between a buyer and its suppliers. It also assists businesses with managing security, quality, ethics, and values and support business continuity

8. What are some challenges that come with GRC automation?

Some primary challenges that come with GRC automation include addressing demands from government and regulating authorities, lack of comprehensive GRC framework, and incomplete elimination of manual processes, etc.

9. Which industries use GRC automation?

Multiple industries use GRC automation in today’s day and age. Majorly stakeholders, such as business executives, finance managers, legal counsels, and IT firms take assistance from GRC to streamline and secure their business processes.

10.  Is GRC affordable?

Yes. GRC is a cost-effective solution.