Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) agility gives your organization the tools needed to pivot and adapt quickly to conquer external and internal threats. A modern business without a fluid GRC framework is like a city without walls. It’s an interrelated risk environment bound to be attacked by invaders should several related processes fail at once. In addition, GRC agility gives your organization the power to swiftly respond to internal and external risk factors.
It is not feasible to create a completely risk-free environment. Nevertheless, the right governance, risk, and compliance framework allows you to identify and tackle invaders before they breach your security protocols. GRC agility and flexibility offer you tools to respond quickly to address risk factors.
What Is GRC Agility?
GRC agility refers to the ability to focus on organizational alignment and process optimization aided by technology. With the right software and practices, you can ensure that your leaders always have access to the latest, most accurate data.
GRC agility services trace the outstretched influence of all kinds of risks and address them as soon as possible. Should you choose to outsource your GRC services, it’s crucial that you select a partner that will provide patent technology and solutions to assist you in moving ahead of demands associated with governance, risk, and development.
This guide covers everything you need to know about GRC agility, its importance, and the benefits of adopting the framework.
The Importance of GRC Agility
Today, companies encounter a potent variety of risks. In addition, regulations are constantly evolving even as regulatory investigations and penalties grow. Also, cyber threats are increasing as new technologies like Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) grow more rapidly.
In the meantime, as personnel changes, strategies and training exercises guarantee that your staff remains compliant. Many companies, finding it difficult to hire the right talent in-house, are choosing to address this challenge by outsourcing to managed service provider (MSP) companies. As technologies are incorporated, novel risks have to be studied, be it likely data breaches from smartphones or data biases in AI-enabled systems. As third-party ecosystems grow in complexity, due diligence and observation processes must be reinforced.
All these shifts, linked with espionage risks, cyber security threats, and other issues, require that companies be agile in their GRC frameworks. The quicker you can respond to risks and adjust to new compliance needs; the more productive your organization will be.
How To Build A GRC Framework with Agility in Mind
Here are ways companies can reinforce the agility of their GRC frameworks.
Create a large-view strategy
It’s no longer sufficient to manage risks as separate entities. Everything in today’s world is interrelated. Cyber threats, third-party risks, regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), quality control requirements, and business performance objectives are entangled, each impacting the other. Therefore, a seemingly insignificant issue like an unpatched vulnerability could result in a major problem because of its influence on other business risks.
Hence, the initial stride in increasing GRC agility is to view the bigger picture and realize not just a single risk and its effects but also how it links everything in the risk chain, including the compliance, audit, and business universes. Organizations’ decision-makers need a merged, complete perspective of GRC to steer their organization through the risks ahead. Effective collaborations between your business and IT departments are essential.
If an organization utilizes an isolated framework and classification to evaluate and report risks, disorder and disarray are bound to happen. Merged GRC technology brings everything together. It provides a framework and data collection that can be exploited by the risk management department as well as compliance, IT security, audit, legal, and the business to aid cooperation and understanding.
Constant and Early Reporting
To be agile and to make choices quicker, companies need well-timed intuition and intelligence. Risk and compliance information across business departments needs to be obtained, aggregated, grouped, and transmitted to the management as close to real-time as possible.
Obtaining information from various departments can take weeks, giving GRC professionals little time to examine the data and map out trends. In the process, reporting becomes obsolete quickly. And without current information on risk, management teams cannot effectively tackle recurring issues such as an unexpected rise in internal harassment complaints or an imminent IT security threat.
Developments in AI, Machine Learning, and Big Data analytics enable business leaders to compare large volumes of information to quickly reveal concealed risks. Means like these will be necessary for organizations to make prompt, sophisticated decisions in an era of continual change and disturbance.
Engage The First Line Of Defense
A fluid GRC framework addresses all lines of defense. The health worker at the medical facility, the cashier at the bank, the driller on an oil rig, and the marketer out in the field make fundamental risk and compliance decisions daily. As the organization’s front line, they are more likely than others to detect looming threats, issues, and concerns. Hence, engaging them in GRC should be the utmost priority.
Many organizations use performance incentives to induce their employees to be more risk-conscious and compliant. Other companies are searching for strategies to make GRC easier and more attractive.
GRC frameworks are progressively being configured for the first line with intuitive interfaces, individualized pages, easy reporting processes, and negligible user training requirements. All these measures will be critical in making GRC pervasive across the organization.
Fortify Integration
A robust GRC framework can integrate and harmonize various views on risk across quality, IT, and the rest of the business. A risk library can assist by standardizing classifications and communication protocols.
The other facet of harmonization is ensuring that as internal and external environments evolve, GRC’s usefulness, processes, and systems also change in an organized manner. There’s no sense in pumping millions of dollars into temporary GRC programs that lead to several silos and disparate processes. Developing a solid groundwork of data and process frameworks is the starting point of a sustainable and agile GRC program.
Benefits Of Adopting a GRC Framework
GRC agility brings many benefits to the organization, including:
- Saves money by guaranteeing compliance with regulations and averting noncompliance penalties. Also, companies with agile GRC frameworks and software benefit from lower insurance premiums and are eligible for lower rates.
- Saves time when all parties concerned have straight involvement in Enterprise Risk Management-related processes; this improves productivity and supervision. Process efficiency managed by a GRC framework allows staff to be more productive with fewer resources in the same amount of time.
- Decreases remediation by executing operations, including more automation, improved communication, and effective work allocation.
- Improves decision-making and performance with greater supervision and fewer sudden risk events, resulting in a more accurate perspective of an organization’s risk and compliance bearing. Decision-makers can make informed decisions about investments, improvement, and acquisitions. Better decisions lead to more flourishing product launches, market expansions, and collaborations.
- Yields consistent compliance because a GRC framework helps determine and forestall lost evaluations. Automated processes reduce the dependence on managers, freeing them to focus on risk management and compliance projects.
- Ensures operational stability because using an agile GRC framework helps you record and centralize risk and compliance knowledge, develop a robust risk against reward decision-making tradition, and create third-party risk visibility and accountability. The GRC framework also helps you prepare for the future by providing access to updated, accurate facts and figures.
Outsource to a Proven MSP for GRC Services
If you’re looking to outsource your risk management, cloud computing, or the development of consumer technologies with a focus on GRC, partnering with an MSP is an excellent option. Intertec International, an ISO-27001 certified provider, has the experience and expertise to help your company embrace GRC. Our experts will help you keep up with the ever-changing demands and requirements of GRC.
Interested in learning more about our GRC services? Download our free whitepaper.
