Growing regulatory environment, higher business complexity and increased focus on accountability have led enterprises to pursue a broad range of governance, risk and compliance initiatives across the organization. However, these initiatives are uncoordinated in an era when risks are interdependent and controls are shared. As a result, these initiatives get planned and managed in silos, which potentially increases the overall business risk for the organization. In addition, parallel compliance and risk initiatives lead to duplication of efforts and cause costs to spiral out of control. Governance, Risk, and Compliance process through control, definition, enforcement, and monitoring has the ability to coordinate and integrate these initiatives.

It is critical that a GRC solution must be able to address a wide range of compliance and risk management initiatives so that an organization can leverage GRC to deploy a consistent framework across the organization for compliance and risk management. Many vendors window dress their point solution by re-labeling it as a GRC solution or adding support for a few additional regulations to claim multi-regulatory label.

Usually IT Governance shall be combined by Risk and Compliance and called IT-GRC. The IT GRC ensure that the activities and functions of IT organization(s) support objectives investments are maximized, IT delivers envisioned benefits against the strategy, costs are optimized, and relevant best practices incorporated, furthermore the optimal investments are made in IT and critical IT resources are responsibly, effectively and efficiently managed and used.

The span of a Governance, Risk and Compliance process includes three elements

• Governance is the oversight role and the process by which companies manage and mitigate business risks.
• Risk management enables an organization to evaluate all relevant business and regulatory risks and controls and monitor mitigation actions in a structured manner.
• Compliance ensures that an organization has the processes and internal controls to meet the requirements imposed by governmental bodies, regulators, industry mandates or internal policies

Benefits of Taking an Integrated GRC Approach

Many organizations find themselves managing their governance, risk and compliance initiatives in silos - each initiative managed separately even if reporting needs overlap. Even though, each of these initiatives individually follow the governance, risk and compliance process outlined above, when they deployed software solutions to enable these processes, the selections were made in a very tactical manner, without a thought for a broader set of requirements. As a result, organizations have ended up with dozens of such systems to manage individual governance, risk and compliance initiatives, each operating in its own silo.

By taking an integrated GRC process approach and deploying a single system to manage the multiple governance, risk and compliance initiatives across the organization, the issues listed above can be easily addressed. Such an approach can:

• Have a dramatic positive impact on organizational effectiveness by providing a clear, unambiguous process and a single point of reference for the organization.
• Eliminate all redundant work in various initiatives.
• Eliminate duplicative software, hardware, training and rollout costs as multiple governance, risk and compliance initiatives can be managed with one software solution.
• Provide a “single version of the truth” available to employees, management, auditors and regulatory bodies.