If you’ve been following along with our five-part series on GRC maturity (No? Start here.) you probably won’t be surprised to hear that at Cask we believe centralized and secure governance, risk, and compliance practices are absolutely vital to running a smoother, safer, and more profitable business.
That’s why in this final installment of our guide to GRC maturity, we want to cover how you can go from a state of stressful disarray to one of blissful optimization by tightening up these core processes: policy and compliance management, risk management, audit management, and vendor risk management.
We’re even going to let you in on the secret that empowers our business and our clients’ businesses to stay compliant and risk-free even with all these moving parts: ServiceNow.
Policy and compliance management
The Policies and Compliance Management module in ServiceNow contains an overview and detailed information related to policy approvals, policies, and policy statements.
Using this module, you can start automating and centralizing the following activities to eliminate silo thinking and empower your staff to get back to the work they love:
- Establish controls and control owners
- Define control tests and expected results
- Set up test and control frequencies
- Identify risk impact and likelihood
- Prepare attestations
- Map authoritative sources to policies, procedures, controls, and risks
Risk management
The ServiceNow Risk Management application provides a centralized process where you can identify, assess, respond to, and continuously monitor enterprise-level IT, HR, and other risks to business operations and success.
Risk management even provides structured workflows for further managing risk assessments, risk indicators, and risk issues.
Audit management
The ServiceNow Audit Management element of ServiceNow involves a set of activities related to planning audit engagements, executing engagements, and reporting findings to the audit committee and executive board. Engagement reporting ensures key stakeholders that the organization’s risk and compliance management strategy is effective.
Audit management further ensures effective GRC strategy by empowering users to schedule internal audits, conduct resource planning, scope engagements, conduct audit activities, review continuous monitoring results, and report findings.
In other words, time-consuming, manual auditing is a thing of the past.
Vendor risk management
ServiceNow’s Vendor Risk Management application provides a centralized process for managing your organization’s vendor portfolio and completing the vendor assessment and remediation lifecycle.
And, because it integrates with other ServiceNow GRC applications, it even provides top-down traceability for compliance—complete with controls and risks.
ServiceNow has two important things in spades: Centralization and integration.
Could your business double down on maintaining compliance, managing and remediating risk, activating and reporting audits, and assessing vendor relationships? We have no doubt. But do you have the resources or desire to effectively centralize or integrate highly-mature GRC processes? If the answer is no, you’re not alone. Cask’s team of certified ServiceNow specialists offers services ranging from one-time consulting to white-glove implementation and operation. Reach out today to find the right fit for your unique GRC needs.
Whichever way you decide to proceed on your GRC journey, we wish you the best of luck. In fact, we’d love to help you along the way. Get in touch with us anytime.
