What is Governance, Risk, and Compliance as a Service (GRCaaS)?
GRC encompasses a set of principles, policies, and processes designed to ensure that organizations operate ethically, efficiently, and in compliance with applicable laws and regulations. It serves as a framework for establishing the right structure, controls, and oversight mechanisms to mitigate risks, maintain compliance, and achieve strategic objectives.
But, in the fast-paced world of cybersecurity, organizations face the daunting challenge of ensuring compliance with an ever-increasing number of regulations. Traditional methods of audits and assessments often fall short of providing a dynamic and efficient solution because they rely on manual processes, periodic evaluations, and point-in-time reports. As a result, it makes it inefficient to maintain real-time, continuous compliance that evolves with your business.
After all, the continuous nature of compliance is crucial for organizations to proactively identify and address potential compliance gaps, adapt to regulatory changes, and ensure a resilient and secure environment in the face of evolving risks.
In recent years, the "as a service" model has gained immense popularity, and for good reason. It offers both a bigger picture view of all your GRC work and functional enhancements such as cross-matching requirements across other compliance assessments. Avertium's GRC as a Service (GRCaaS) leverages this approach, addressing a long-standing complaint from consultants who receive static, point-in-time reports and PDFs. Instead, customers are now empowered with more dynamic data sets, allowing for real-time monitoring and analysis.
Related Resource: Webinar – Key Shifts in Identity Management and Governance
Why is the Industry Moving to GRCaaS?
Annual compliance assessments such as PCI and HIPAA have become a source of frustration for businesses. They serve an important purpose, yes, but as with so many regulations, they create a lot of hoops for companies to jump through. Most organizations just monitor or check-the-box when it comes to GRC because compliance has been a historically static, check-the-box kind of thing for most businesses. It’s done, then left on a shelf.
That being said, this led to 6 common complaints about GRC:
- Reports aren’t helpful or actionable – Customers simply want confirmation of their compliance status so they can focus on other business priorities. Unfortunately, many auditors act like “police auditors” who point out a bunch of problems and don't help the business act on any solutions.
- Compliance assessments are point-in-time / static – Most compliance assessments and reports are essentially a snapshot in time of your compliance posture. This makes it hard to measure progress over time.
- Not all compliance assessments are created equal - It’s like the difference between using Turbo Tax to “check all the boxes” with your taxes vs. working with an experienced CPA that can help you strategize. The quality of the output depends on te quality of your vendor or partner.
- The current GRC process is inefficient – Each mandate comes with its own set of requirements that often overlap with other assessments or mandates. Streamlining these requirements would optimize the assessment process and avoid duplicative efforts.
- Documentation burden is high (and continues to pile up) – With a vast number of controls to report on and documentation to upload or submit, this can often feel chaotic as deadlines approach.
- Not worth the investment – Though traditional GRC solutions are in part, the cost of doing business (i.e. healthcare organizations needing to be HIPAA compliant), they tend to be expensive while also providing only limited value since it is a point-in-time report. But what if you could get more?
This is where continuous compliance comes in – with GRCaaS, businesses get real-time risk management, replacing outdated manual methods that lack efficiency and fail to detect interconnected risks. By utilizing hyper-automated tools and continuous control monitoring, organizations can proactively identify vulnerabilities and ensure compliance in the face of evolving challenges like the ones above.
Moving from Reactive GRC to Proactive GRCaaS
GRCaaS revolutionizes the way businesses tackle GRC challenges, directly addressing the common complaints surrounding traditional approaches. It is designed to provide comprehensive, efficient, and valuable support to organizations seeking to navigate compliance requirements with ease.
Avertium’s GRCaaS offering was designed to make compliance more of a living, breathing thing by consistently monitoring the organization’s security posture and driving improvement to arrive at a compliance state that enables key business stakeholders to do what they need to do: get back to running their business.
- Get a more effective, more proactive approach to meeting compliance mandates: Instead of merely going through the motions and treating it as a checkbox exercise, Avertium’s GRCaaS experts actively engage with our customers to ensure that we avoid a last-minute rush during audits. With a comprehensive visibility and control catalog, auditors continuously assess the maturity and status of controls. Any aspects that require improvement or adjustment are promptly identified and addressed, ensuring that compliance is maintained throughout the year. This shift allows us to move away from the stressful "fire drill" mentality associated with compliance, towards a smoother and more consistent process.
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Close the GRC loop with continuous compliance and avoid duplicative efforts and documentation burden: This one-stop shop supports both compliance and managed services, greatly simplifying the process of taking action based on GRC reports. By consolidating compliance and services, the information provided becomes more actionable. The risk register acts as a checklist, outlining areas of exposure and necessary mitigations for the foreseeable future. However, this is only the initial step. Avertium goes beyond by actively reviewing compliance, controls, and scans with clients, regardless of whether they have proper endpoint security monitoring in place.
- Connect your larger cybersecurity strategy with our Cyber Fusion approach: Avertium adopts an efficient Cyber Fusion approach that goes beyond focusing on a single type of control. Instead, it takes into account the bigger picture, considering factors such as administration, governance, and compliance. This approach brings substantial value, not only for a CISO but for the entire organization. What sets us apart from other companies is our robust offering that covers all the necessary components, with an API connection to your managed service. The knowledge and insights we gain from this connection feed into a unified portal, improving our services. It's important to note that the connection is not between the fusion engine and the portal; instead, it leverages APIs to establish a connection. By doing so, we provide enhanced visibility and a consolidated view, offering a centralized location to access information related to compliance and the services Avertium provides.
The Role of the GRC Customer Portal
A key component of Avertium's GRCaaS is the customer portal – built to offer centralized management and visibility of all things GRC in one place.
GRCaaS from Avertium drastically reduces the level of effort required to meet regulatory mandates. Our platform will provide your team with the ability to analyze data, create questionnaires and tasks for individual business units and providers, schedule interviews, and immediately integrate insights into a more comprehensive score. With Avertium’s GRC portal, you can measure the health of your security controls today and get ahead of compliance requirements tomorrow.
Avertium’s security experts take a consultative approach that goes beyond basic compliance to measure the health of your security program over time, enabling you to move away from static, ineffective, point-in-time compliance to a compliance posture that’s continuous, dynamic, and integrated into your business operations.
Conclusion
With GRC as a Service, compliance becomes a living, breathing roadmap that aligns closely with your larger business strategy.
GRC doesn’t have to be an annual fire drill. It can serve as a compass that helps businesses monitor contracts, decide on internal controls, build business continuity plans, plan cybersecurity investments, and more.
This is one step of many that Avertium is taking to help our customers be more proactive and more effective in the face of an ever-changing regulatory environment and the ever-evolving threat landscape.
to learn more about Avertium’s GRCaaS click here
