IT GRC Processes
The practice of Information Technology Governance, Risk Mitigation, and Compliance management (ITGRC) enables organizations to identify, assess and mitigate potential material losses that may arise from lack of appropriate controls, non-compliance with regulations, standards, and policies and procedures. To proactively and effectively manage and prevent risks, organizations require to adopt a strategic approach to remain ahead of technological and regulatory changes while staying on top of tactical day-to-day activities of IT operations.
Companies are currently struggling with the traditional ways of managing IT GRC processes as they are unable to scale the activities and resources to meet the ever-growing number of IT GRC issues. For instance, Compliance Management teams spend over 60% of the time on data collection, cleansing, and preparation for analysis and reporting, for each assessment or audit cycle and over 30% of the time analyzing data and formatting reports. This constitutes over 7 weeks of each 8-week assessment cycle.
Automating IT GRC processes is about using technology to enable companies to handle large numbers of IT GRC issues, provide better analysis of IT GRC metrics, and alert the compliance teams when metrics exceed the performance boundaries. Automation in IT GRC will increase compliance efficiencies and improve the monitoring accuracy of compliance teams.
Using automation technology to centralize compliance efforts in one platform will provide companies with complete visibility and confidence in their IT GRC processes. It will also allow compliance managers to access data and insights in real-time rather than an annual or quarterly update on the regulatory compliance requirements which aren’t frequent enough and often expose companies to non-compliance risk. Considering the above illustration, not only can the 8-week assessment period be significantly reduced, but also mundane or repetitive tasks can be automated by integrating the data collection and asset state management applications.
IT GRC Processes
Automating IT GRC processes has many benefits for the company. Some of them are:
1. Robust working methodologies
The risk & audit teams will have the assurance that a robust IT GRC strategy is in place with the continuous monitoring and automation of data collection.
2. Mitigate risks
Automation will allow companies to capture data accurately and will automatically spot any out-of-tolerance measures, which the compliance teams can immediately work on. Risk & compliance data is delivered in such a way that can be easily communicated within the teams.
3. Reduce cost and manual work
Automation will eliminate the need for labor-intensive data gathering and administration, which in turn increases efficiency and cuts down operating costs.
4. Reduce risks of non-compliance
Automation will help companies save money as they can eliminate paying non-compliant related fines and minimize the risk of the reputational damage
5. Provides Visibility
Automation platforms for IT GRC support informed data-driven decisions and give a holistic view of the organization’s risk profile.
6. Easy Collaboration
Automation enables cross-functional collaboration with consistent approaches, metrics, and reporting.
A study by CoalFire found that the shift towards automation reduces assessment costs and timelines and 62% of surveyed companies said that automating evidence collection reduces their overall compliance impact.
IT GRC Automation has some drawbacks. They include being expensive for some IT organizations, the need for sufficient skilled staff to ensure that the automation system can be managed and configured correctly, and some companies might not have the workforce to launch an IT GRC automation project.
Some of the reasons why companies are not automating their IT GRC processes yet are:
1. Cost
Companies tend to assume that automating IT GRC is expensive given the complexities involved in automating cross-functional processes.
2. Time-taking
Automating IT GRC is a major undertaking and is usually not of high priority when the company is still undergoing digital transformation in its core processes. IT GRC automation requires proper resources to ensure effective implementation.
3. ‘No’ from the senior leaders
The required effort and the wealth of systems springing up promising to deliver IT GRC automation can be overwhelming that senior leaders may not be on board with the idea of automating IT GRC.
Third Ray’s Compliance Automation Platform (CAP) overcomes all the common challenges that companies face in taking their decision on IT GRC Automation. Third Ray CAP will help companies automate the time-taking and manual IT GRC processes and simplify the security audits and also eliminates the need to collect data and perform audits manually.
Third Ray Compliance Automation Platform helps companies prepare for IT GRC audits in just a couple of weeks rather than months.
Third Ray CAP provides continuous monitoring and protection of data. Third Ray CAP’s templates and continuous monitoring mechanism helps companies in getting audit-ready in half the time. Third Ray CAP also automates the collection of evidence.
Third Ray Compliance Automation Platform
The following features of the Third Ray Automation Compliance platform help in providing compliance automation support to companies.
1. Template and control definition
Helps define the templates and documents of all IT compliance controls within the organization, and maps the controls to the requirements within various information security standards- depending on the organization's need (e.g. SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, CMMC, and others). This feature also helps in defining the owners for each control
2. Risk definition
Helps in defining the organization's risk. The risk score is calculated in the following way.
Risk score = Risk Impact * Likelihood
Organizational risk analysis
4.Audit initiation
This feature allows scheduling the initiation of security audits within the defined timelines defined. This feature also allows sending of alerts to the stakeholders
Risk Frequency Score
6. Audit signoff
Allows the signoff /acceptance of the audit findings
Third Ray Compliance Automation Platform
IT GRC Automation helps companies track all their activities — regulations, policies, standards, contracts, and clauses in one place. Some of the benefits of the Third Ray Compliance Automation platform are:
- Streamline data collection and data analysis procedures
- Prepare for auditing in no time
- Timely reporting of compliance, which reduces enterprise risk
- Avoid the risk of human error
- Cost-effective
- Receive real-time alerts for various teams in the company
IT GRC Automation is highly beneficial to companies and should be given a priority in a company’s digital transformation efforts.
To learn more about the Third Ray Compliance Automation Platform, email us at info@thirdray.ai.
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