Data runs the world. In today’s perpetually connected digital era, governance, risk, and compliance services are crucial for every organization. From the local non-profit to the multi-national corporation, regulations dictate everything from data handling to security operations for your infrastructure. How your organization manages governance, risk, and compliance requirements can dramatically impact business efficiency and profitability.
This article explores three ways your organization can help streamline the governance, risk, and compliance management processes to help your business run more effectively and efficiently.
Standardization
Many organizations make the mistake of allowing individual groups to manage their governance rather than having a corporate compliance program. One group may run a program for PCI, while another will run one for Sarbanes-Oxley (Sox) compliance.
While they may develop effective methods for their initiative, they are not designed for the enterprise. The solutions and processes are centered around their needs and regulatory requirements but do not scale organizationally. This siloing creates numerous discrete processes throughout the organization with no centralized vision or methodology for implementing governance, risk, and compliance.
A more mature approach to this includes all of the core components of people, processes, technology, and operational related trust standardizing organizational practices. This unification removes redundant controls and takes the guesswork of how corporate governance is carried out. It simplifies and streamlines workflows for cyber security teams through standardization, which can be managed through existing processes such as ITSM.
Visibility is Key
Part of unifying the governance process is to shed light on how it occurs, bringing visibility to the parties involved. This unified view is vital for management in determining how they fit in the overall ecosystem. Understanding this is crucial for determining their current corporate compliance status and what security risks they are currently facing.
To help manage the overall program, an enterprise risk management solution is essential for having an effective oversight. After an organization has mapped the controls implemented to the required compliance frameworks, they can identify gaps and how to shore them up to effectively meet their needs.
Approaching regulatory compliance in this manner is more efficient than waiting on auditors to determine the shortcomings and scrambling to implement controls and remediate problems. Being proactive creates a smoother and more controlled remediation process, allowing for the right-fit solutions to be selected, rather than what will check the box.
Automation is Essential
Effective governance cannot be maintained through manual processes and operations; there are too many moving parts to coordinate. More mature organizations utilize automation to take control of the process of governance.
One area where automation is essential to governance is determining access to be granted for an identity. Using a manual process for access requests is time-consuming. Someone would have to review the requestor’s existing access and determine whether granting that request fell within acceptable risk guidelines.
With automation, a modern solution can utilize machine learning (ML) to review accounts’ access when granting new access. This removes hours of research and administration in the process better informing decision-makers for managing risk.
Utilizing automation is not about taking the human out of the process. It enables people to make the right decisions and decrease their workload so that they are not rushed, as that leads to rubber stamping.
Managing Governance and Risk
Implementing a solution to manage your organizational governance and risk is a daunting task. You need a partner with the experience to help you avoid the common challenges along the way. Persistent has a team of skilled professionals providing strategy risk and compliance services.
Rather than maintaining a perpetual team, governance risk and compliance consulting allows your organization to get the expertise it needs, while it needs it. Our team can help you determine your governance needs and map out a path to achieve them while minimizing organizational disruption and overall cost.
Learn more about how Persistent can help your organization meet its governance requirements and minimize risk.
