Importance of ServiceNow GRC for a Business

Businesses are constantly struggling to be on pace with new compliance demands and expenses involved in getting more employees and infrastructure which causes problems in managing GRC i.e. Governance, Risk, and Compliance requirements.

ServiceNow GRC is a robust structure that mechanizes the risk management processes while considering any dependencies and enabling businesses to effectively manage their workflow by bringing all such activities to one place which are accessible through a dashboard and provides businesses real time visibility of any issues, threats, and vulnerabilities in advance. GRC being a multilayer and inter-reliant application empowers organizations to improve their legacy practices of dealing with corporate governance, risk, and compliance by assessing the right assets, managing policies, identifying any risks, creating controls, and conducting audits at regular intervals thus ensuring better business process and so driving better business efficiencies. ServiceNow IT Governance, Risk, and Compliance mechanize the critical business process of evaluating and managing adherence to legacy policies.

Benefits of ServiceNow GRC

• GRC manages compliance according to a law/regulation/standard/policy
• Provides Real-time monitoring
• It automates assessments of risk, assesses vendor risks, and creates a risk register
• It identifies the risks and thus manages risks in advance which avoids any adverse impact on the businesses with integrated risk management
• The risk managers use profiles to monitor risks and to accomplish risk assessments, while the compliance manager structures internal controls and screens compliance actions
• Using Controls, risks are mitigated which helps minimize the occurrence or impact of risks
• Enterprise Service Management capabilities are offered by the ServiceNow GRC suite which makes it easier to launch a vast system even with a huge IT infrastructure. This saves a lot of time and resources while ensuring a smoother implementation of the system
• ServiceNow’s GRC allows businesses to integrate all the GRC modules where all the vital digital information about company assets is managed
• Modules in GRC such as Policy and Compliance Management, Risk Management, and Audit Management provide a unique set of benefits to the businesses
• GRC streamlines and automates activities even in case of an emergency or pandemic like today
• It continuously monitors compliance and automates and manages the policy life cycles which makes compliance processes simpler, transparent, organized, and highly reliable
• GRC system uses historical risk data to identify any future risks while prioritizing audit plans and automating cross-functional processes which in result reduces audit costs, maximizes efficiency, and minimizes the risk
• It constantly observes, detects, evaluates, mitigates, and remediates the vendor ecosystem for any risks

Pillars of ServiceNow GRC

There are four pillars of GRC that are described in this section:

Policy and Compliance Management – This provides a centralized process that automates and manages organizational standards, policy lifecycles, and internal control procedures in accordance with the external regulations and continuously monitor and track for compliance. Also, this provides workflows that identify, assess, and continuously monitor the control activities. It has a module that provides a unified platform for policy creation and management.

With the Compliance Management module, clients can manage compliance at each
organizational level. Policy and Compliance management in GRC provides:

• Version management of business policies, guidelines, compliance, etc.,
• Automated process workflows and triggers ensure up-to-date documents
• Management dashboards based on roles that show risk status as low or high
• Integrated control structure that allows control status monitoring and automated control activity triggers
• Status of any non-compliance issues
• The unified compliance framework synchronizes a company’s compliance requirements
• Leveraging highly flexible ServiceNow platform capabilities for fully controlled automation

Risk Management – The Risk Management in ServiceNow GRC is a centralized application that emphasizes identifying, assessing, responding, and continuously monitoring risk factors that can potentially cause damage to the workflow and the business operations. It also manages assessments made with the indicators and issues that can be used to predict any future IT or enterprise risks.

• This dynamically screens risks by aligning automated triggers to start workflows in case of risks or any potential risks or threats
• Risk management monitors and manages company-wide risk status using its configured reports and dashboards
• It provides risk assessments and warnings with automated workflows in case of any new risks associated
• It enables to prioritize risks and respond accordingly providing its business impact analysis
• It automates risk scoring to calculate risk exposure and predicted losses

Audit Management – With Audit Management, companies no longer have to perform their audits manually as this provides a centralized system that automates the internal auditing thus enabling companies to optimize their resources and their productivity while eliminating any recurring audit findings. This ensures audit teams use the risk data to scope engagements, plan, prioritize and track audit observations and complete the audit life cycle.

• Reduces redundant internal or external audit findings and thus decreasing risk and strengthen audit assurance which improves evidence collection and allows managers to spend more time on other high-value tasks
• This considerably reduces time-consuming and expensive activities to offer accurate audit suggestions on time
• It maximizes a company’s productivity by optimizing its resources
• It automates cross-functional processes by scoping, planning, and prioritizing audit plans for associated risk data

Vendor Risk Management – The GRC Vendor Risk Management monitors, detects, assesses, mitigates, and reforms any risks in the vendor system. By managing the vendor portfolio through a centralized system, completes and remediates any risks and integrates with other business applications. Using Vendor risk management, a company can manage the portfolio of different clients/vendors, thus keeping an eye on their complete risk remediation life cycle.

• It ensures that the usage of subcontracted vendors/providers does not create a negative impact on the company’s business performance or any business disruption
• It allows companies to assess vendors to recognize the risk they pose, reduces the manual assessment burden, and thus saves cost through automation

With ServiceNow GRC providing such efficient processes and modules to the businesses, it thus becomes vital for them to opt for this automated and swift technology solution which not only boosts their business productivity but also builds their stable repo in the market.