What Is It Compliance And Governance

How Do I Choose Which Framework To Use

Most IT governance frameworks are designed to help you determine how your IT department is functioning overall, what key metrics management needs and what return IT is giving back to the business from its investments.

Where COBIT and COSO are used mainly for risk, ITIL helps to streamline service and operations. Although CMMI was originally intended for software engineering, it now involves processes in hardware development, service delivery and purchasing. As previously mentioned, FAIR is squarely for assessing operational and cyber security risks.

When reviewing frameworks, consider your corporate culture. Does a particular framework or model seem like a natural fit for your organization? Does it resonate with your stakeholders? That framework is probably the best choice.

But you dont have to choose only one framework. For example, COBIT and ITIL complement one another in that COBIT often explains why something is done or needed where ITIL provides the how. Some organizations have used COBIT and COSO, along with the ISO 27001 standard .

Grc Is Different From Healthcare Compliance

It might seem obvious from item #1 above, but its worth stating more plainly.

Healthcare compliance is focused on answering the question: Are we compliant with federal, state, and other regulations? Compliance is about documenting due diligence related to your chosen frameworks and taking the steps required to comply.

While you can have a healthcare compliance strategy, it is only one part of a broad-reaching governance, risk and compliance strategy.

It Compliance: Goals And Challenges

The overall goal of IT compliance is to build a technical, procedural, and strategic framework that provides the means to attain and prove a companys legal and ethical integrity. Providing defensible mechanisms, policies, and procedures can help avoid the following:

• Damage to corporate image standing or consumer trust
• Lost revenue, market opportunity, or stock value
• Remediation expenditures

However, achieving this goal is met with many challenges. First and foremost, the complexity and scope of new statutes are subject to interpretation. Since the regulations themselves do not come with a concrete roadmap, there are numerous industry-specific guidelines and best practices available that provide clarity and guidance.Other challenges include:

• Shadow IT issues, such as personal mobile devices that circumvent corporate IT systems.
• Unauthorized applications
• Difficulties with service providers
• The role of social media
• Number of current regulations, updates, and new laws

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Why Is Data Compliance Important

Public and private sector organizations have a fiduciary responsibility to protect the information they use to manage their businesses. Availability of relevant standards, regulations, and other governance rules and practices that deal with the security, privacy and protection of data ensures that data can be securely managed and protected.

These activities are important in the IT security audit process, which devotes a lot of time examining all aspects of how data is managed. Failure to demonstrate compliance with the relevant data governance procedures can result in unsatisfactory audit findings that have to be corrected.

Senior management in public or private sector organizations may be held accountable for audit findings that indicate failure to comply with data governance requirements. More likely, IT department leaders will be required to correct those findings so they’re data-compliant and meet with the satisfaction of auditors and senior company management.

Who Is Responsible For Compliance

Although best practice frameworks are available to guide adherence to compliance regulations, people are necessary to make it all happen. The roles of compliance strategy and implementation are evolving within enterprises with departments and C-Suite positions, including a dedicated compliance department who, along with the CCO, can be tasked with overseeing, planning, and managing elements that work towards IT compliance. Lets take a closer look at the roles of a CCO and the overall compliance team.

Chief Compliance Officer : The CCO will be responsible for identifying and managing compliance risk, including developing internal and external controls to manage and resolve compliance problems. Oftentimes, a CCO will put a compliance department in place to provide complete compliance services to the business and staff.

Chief Technology Office : Unlike a CCO, the CTO oversees the entire technology framework and infrastructure including compliance, governance, and risk assessment.

Compliance Department: If an organization has a dedicated compliance department, they will be charged with managing and overseeing compliance with all applicable regulations and mandates. Duties may include:

• Risk identification
• Reporting on the effectiveness of controls
• Resolving compliance problems
• Providing regulatory advisement to the business

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How To Evaluate Grc Software

Keeping up with constantly changing risks, regulations, and policies takes a GRC technology solution thats flexible, scalable, and integrated. The right GRC software will add efficiency, prove effectiveness, and elevate the value of the risk management function to the organization. As you evaluate possible solutions, consider asking:

Learn how to conquer the new world of risk with integrated risk management.

The Benefits Of A Grc Strategy

The business landscape is rapidly changing. The supply chain is more interconnected, the cybersecurity threats more sophisticated, and the regulations more complicated. These are just some of the factors that require you to constantly react to changes and adapt to new realities. This is where your governance, risk, and compliance strategy comes in to help you prioritize your needs and actions.

Some of the GRC benefits include:

• Eliminating corporate silos and redundancies through a unified, integrated approach
• Improving operational efficiencies and optimizing IT investments
• Reducing the costs of noncompliance, cybersecurity incidents, and other adverse events
• Making better decisions related to your business
• Strengthening business components such as ethics, integrity, transparency, and assurance

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What Are The Four Components Of The Grc Framework

According to the OCEG, the four components of the GRC Capability Model are learn, align, perform, and review:

• Learn about the organizational context, culture, and key stakeholders to inform objectives, strategy, and actions.
• Align strategy with key business objectives by using effective decision-making that addresses values, opportunities, threats and requirements.
• Perform actions that reward desirable outcomes, prevent and remediate undesirable outcomes, and detect when something happens as soon as possible.
• Review the design and operating effectiveness of the strategy and actions, as well as the ongoing appropriateness of objectives, to improve the organization.

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What Are The Benefits Of It Governance

IT managers and system administrators know technology like the back of their hands. They work with it day in, and day out and keep up with the latest trends at all times. So, to the administrator, it might seem like adding in an IT governance process is an extra step added to their busy days. However, there are many benefits to IT governance, including:

• Getting buy-in from stakeholders, partners and customers is never easy, but showing that you have taken the extra step to implement an IT governance plan gives them added assurance that you mean business.
• Controlling your risks doesnt come automatically. It has to be studied in a working environment where a standard, replicable process has been implemented. IT governance helps track risks in a controlled experimental environment.
• Ensure your company is meeting rules and regulations around compliance, so you can reduce risk and eliminate liability.
• Better align your IT department with the companys overall business objectives, so they can prioritize their projects better.
• Better measure performance for your IT department and optimize their processes, so they dont have to waste time on clunky processes that had previously been in place.

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What Are Compliance Governance And Risk Management

To understand compliance in a personal sense, think of receiving a yearly privacy notice from your bank, signing a HIPAA form at your doctor visit, or experiencing a lockout for using a password incorrectly. For the IT professional, compliance includes the activities that maintain and provide systematic proof of both adherence to internal policies and the external laws, guidelines, or regulations imposed upon the company.

This is done through a defensible process. There are two elements of compliance: one focuses on the management of compliance, and the second manages the integrity of the system used to adhere to and prove compliance. Today, the role of IT compliance continues to grow as the electronic sharing and storing of information impacts departments such as finance, human resources, and operations that all depend on the services of IT in their information gathering, dissemination, and reporting.

IT Compliance is taking appropriate control of and protecting information, including how it is obtained and stored, how it is secured, its availability , and how the data is protected. The internal compliance functions revolve around the policies, goals, and organizational structure of the business. External considerations include satisfying the customer/end user while protecting the company and end user from harm. Specialized tools are used to continuously identify, monitor, report, and audit to achieve and remain in compliance.

Which Compliance Regulations Apply To Your Organization

Dealing with the multitude of regulations across numerous industries is daunting for many organizations. In the US a company may be subject to the authority of one or several regulating bodies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission , the Federal Communications Commission , and the Federal Trade Commission . The industries most affected are the financial, retail and e-commerce, health insurance and services, other insurance institutions, banking, defense, utilities, and credit card issuers who have access to sensitive information. But the list also includes any organization that keeps sensitive information – for example, any organization that has social security numbers this encompasses most employers, government entities, and colleges and universities.

It is difficult to identify enterprises, especially global ones, that are not subject to local, regional, state, federal, or international regulations. HIPAA mandates affect health care insurers and practitioners, but there are also provisions that affect any employer that offers health insurance to its employees. In addition to formal laws and regulations, be aware of industry standards . The bottom line is if an IT department is charged with protecting information to ensure confidentiality, integrity, reliability, or availability of information, the chances are there are numerous regulations that demand compliance.

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Our Three Step Process Includes:

We understand what the risk is, and we are highly-skilled in developing the security controls necessary to manage the risk compliance at the level determined as acceptable. We demonstrate compliance with the regulatory laws and meet all corporate compliance requirements such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, GLBA, Sarbanes-Oxley and many others.

The Relationship Between Governance Risk And Compliance

The In Focus mini-series examines more closely issues and topics of importance to federal agencies and contractors. Each month, Federal News Radio speaks with key stakeholders to better understand challenges and opportunities. This month focuses on Governance, Risk and Compliance.

Governance, risk and compliance go hand-in-hand. Risk is understanding uncertainty. Compliance focuses on adhering to policies and regulations, micro and macro. Governance is key for stakeholders who put into processes and practices the whole…

The In Focus mini-series examines more closely issues and topics of importance to federal agencies and contractors. Each month, Federal News Radio speaks with key stakeholders to better understand challenges and opportunities. This month focuses on Governance, Risk and Compliance.

Host

Tom Temin, Federal News Radio

Tom Temin has been the host of the Federal Drive since 2006. Tom has been reporting on and providing insight to technology markets for more than 30 years. Prior to joining Federal News Radio, Tom was a long-serving editor-in-chief of Government Computer News and Washington Technology magazines. Tom also contributes a regular column on government information technology.

Guest

Ilanko Subramaniam, GRC Practice Leader, CISSP, CISM, Optiv

Ilanko is a Principal and leads the GRC Practice for Optiv Security, focused on delivering risk and compliance services and platform implementation to support Fortune 500 organizations.

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Compliance Audits And Reports

Assessments and audits are a method for determining compliance. Performed by an audit committee, a compliance audit can determine if a company is adhering to the applicable laws by a systematic review of policies, procedures, operations, and controls. Since IT has company-wide reach, an audit is usually done across numerous departments. The scope of an IT compliance audit identifies the laws and requirements, assesses how specific laws, requirements, or standards are being met, and provides recommendations and remedies for non-compliance.

IT compliance reports are often required during audits in order to provide a correlated log of data that contains evidence of compliance. In addition to audits, compliance reports will be used by the IT team to uncover security breaches, underlying threats, and policy violations that need to be corrected before severe damage occurs. A balanced scorecard is one option for measuring whether your compliance strategy is being executed successfully without impacting the mission of your business.

Governance Best Practice Frameworks

Gartner Research defines IT Governance as the processes that ensure the effective and efficient use of IT enabling an organization to achieve its goals. There are numerous frameworks that already exist to assist with governance. These include:

What To Ask When Considering New Grc Software

Strong, technology-enabled GRC programs can be a real competitive differentiator for organizations, so making the right choice is essential. With multiple technology options and no common definitions, knowing when you need a GRC solution or which one you need isnt easy.

Here are four questions to help define your focus when beginning the GRC software purchase process:

Involving too many stakeholders can lead to buying tools you dont need or wasting money on multiple point solutions with overlapping features. You cant please everyone, so focus on addressing the practicalities of those who have skin in the game.

The best GRC solution enables organizations to understand what could happen and what can be done about it, so leadership can make fast and smart decisions to protect the organization.

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Grc: What Is It A Comprehensive Guide To Governance Risk Management And Compliance

Keeping your company on track is harder than it sounds. Its a common assumption that once your company is off the ground, making some solid revenue and performing well in generalthen all is done and you can sit back and relax.

This is far from the truth.

Maintaining this level of success means ensuring the behind-the-scenes work is done to the best of your ability. You must ensure the company is complying with all rules and regulations, managing risks sufficiently, and governing itself well.

This is where Governance, Risk Management and Compliance comes in. GRC is a system or framework used by organizations to manage these three areas mentioned in the titlegovernance, risk management and compliance.

Lets take a more detailed look at each of these concepts, judge why they are important, as well as identify how and where they can be used within your company.

Lets get going!

Why Is Governance Risk And Compliance Important

As organizations grow, they eventually reach a size where a formalized, integrated framework for governance, risk management, and compliance is required to operate at maximum efficiency. Without such a framework, these activities may be managed separately by siloed departments or business units. This leads to major inefficiencies that can include duplication of tasks and effort, excess costs, taking on too much risk , and compliance issues with a variety of consequences.

The basis of the GRC framework is that accomplishing business objectives requires an integrated approach that effectively aligns business goals and objectives with risk management, compliance, and ethical conduct.

The GRC framework outlines a five-step process for avoiding the negative consequences of poorly managed governance, risk, and compliance:

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Grc Strengths And Limitations

If properly implemented, GRC policies, practices and software offer the following benefits:

• reduced costs
• ongoing compliance with required standards and regulations
• protection against unfavorable internal audits, financial penalties and litigation and
• reduction in risk across the entire organization, including business risks, financial risks, operational risks and security risks.

If improperly implemented or if senior management support for GRC is minimal, potential issues may emerge. Problems include high costs related to reduced risk visibility, reduced performance due to weak risk visibility, and fragmentation across the organization’s departments and workforce.

Compliance: Acting With Integrity

Compliance is the act of ensuring that a set of instructions or a standard is followed, or that proper, consistent accounting or other processes are used.

Compliance guarantees that the organisation takes measures and implements control to ensure that compliance obligations are satisfied consistently, depending on the circumstances.

Traditionally, these three activities were carried out in a more or less independent manner. Each of the three disciplines in a GRC approach continues to interact with and support existing business operations, but the benefits are realised at the intersection of the three.

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