Cybersecurity Governance, Risk, and Compliance before GRC

The idea of Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (GRC) has been fundamentally integrated into the idea of how a business should be run for centuries. While it hadn’t been officially acknowledged as a solution with a name, it was implemented on every level across every business. Any policy, government law, regulation, company code of conduct, and business risk fits into the umbrella of a GRC framework, even if it was never referred to as such. Well before the dawn of the digital age and cloud-based processes and technologies, bookkeeping, financial reports, company rules, and calculating risk and controls in business were standard to properly and efficiently scale an organization. As technologies and the size of the market grew, the need to have GRC as a tool in the marketplace was introduced in 2002 by Forrester in the wake of multiple disasters that rocked the foundation of the world as we knew it.

After 2002, GRC systems became a consumable utility in the marketplace, allowing businesses to manage their business processes digitally; for the time, this was sufficient to operate a business. There was less data to worry about, and modular tools allowed practitioners to see a specific section of their business simultaneously. But as regulatory requirements changed and the need to operate businesses grew, the time needed to analyze data in GRC software grew with it. This trend has only caused frustration among cybersecurity professionals and regulatory compliance teams working with GRC solutions as a means to scale and operate their security efforts.

[What is GRC?]

Governance

Governance is the process through which executive management directs and manages a large enterprise at scale using a combination of hierarchy and policies. Corporate governance is designed to ensure that senior management has the necessary and most current information to effectively make decisions and inform company strategy.

Risk Management

Risk Management is the process of quantifying, evaluating, and prioritizing potential assessed risks to an organization based on their entire operation as a whole. Proper risk management practices require that an organization uses coordinated and fiscally responsible choices to utilize resources in a way that controls, monitors, and mitigates security risks that can have negative consequences for a business day today.

Compliance

Compliance programs are the rules of the market, government, or industry in which the organization operates. This is beneficial to ensuring continuity between organizations in the same field and ensures a safe equal playing field for consumers and companies associated with an organization. In the case of cybersecurity, compliance requirements are designed to ensure that consumers can operate with an expected degree of trust in the organization that their data is safe from theft. 

While these individual applications may have been sufficient to run a business in the past, it simply leaves too many security gaps to supplement an organization's operations in today’s landscape. The GRC meaning and GRC tool definition is wrought with inefficiencies for business management. The components that makeup GRC do not communicate across each other and contain tools that act independently instead of in unison. 

Modern Times, Modern Solutions

Through our research, we’ve found countless GRC programs use buzzwords such as: ‘organization GRC’, ‘compliance GRC’, or ‘enterprise GRC’ but don’t aggregate data in a feasible and readable way. Charts in GRC tools are presented in complex, time-consuming metrics that need to be mapped and do not work across other GRC tools in unity. 

Additionally, legacy GRC tools do not operate interchangeably, limiting visibility across lines of business, meaning everything is segmented, further costing resources and increasing the likelihood of errors over time when using a GRC tool. These headaches often result in security teams using spreadsheets to determine risk assessments rather than a GRC systems compliance tool. 

For any business, large or small, running an information security initiative off a spreadsheet is a static, dated, and flawed process. By adopting an integrated mindset and utilizing an enterprise risk management solution, you can gain access to your organization's posture as a whole in a way that can align your teams to your business objectives.

One of the largest obstacles to using GRC in an efficient way in today’s marketplace is the fact that it’s incredibly time-consuming and costly to any organization. Proving corporate compliance across frameworks in GRC can take several months, sometimes upwards of a year, to conduct a full series of assessments. It also takes an entirely new workflow to cross-reference GRC efforts, resulting in additional time, labor, and resources.

Why IRM Is The Future

While the methodologies of these practices have rapidly changed in the past two decades, the need for more cohesive and unified solutions has also grown in the form of integrated risk management (IRM). IRM is a mindset to manage and operate your organization’s cybersecurity risk management program as a whole, not only addressing the errors of GRC platforms but vastly improving on them in a way that can align with any organization today. On a fundamental level, communicability, flexibility, and execution make up the philosophy of IRM. Using an IRM strategy, you can improve decision-making and gain visibility to your organization through one well-rounded solution instead of a suite full of tools.

Using IRM has numerous benefits compared to the workflows and methodologies of GRC, one of the strongest being cohesiveness and visibility across your entire business instead of just one segmented area. Good IRM platforms enable information security leaders and teams to integrate GRC activities into a central location instead of across modules. This can enable an organization to see its posture as a whole and make well-informed decisions based on where to reduce risk or liability in the case of a disaster, as well as ensure your organization can reliably achieve compliance. It can do so in a cost-effective way. This, in tandem with real-time posturing and audit management capabilities, makes IRM a must-have for organizations looking to stay compliant long-term.

CyberStrong as an IRM Strategy Solution

If your security team has been considering using a GRC company or is looking for a better way to optimize and integrate its cybersecurity efforts past GRC capabilities, make the shift to integrated risk management with CyberStrong. CyberStrong has the ability to show your organization’s cybersecurity posture as a whole and perform internal audits, manage risk and translate comprehensively, processing and automating much of the menial tasks on the backend so your security team can focus on filling in gaps in your organization’s security initiatives. Fully integrated solutions work in real-time for today’s landscape, not GRC tool suites. If you’re curious about how CyberStrong can help accelerate your organization’s security efforts, call us at 1-800 NIST CSF or visit our website here.