A Beginner’s Guide to  GRC Framework

GRC stands for Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance—an integrated approach encompassing processes, strategies, and actions that organizations implement to mitigate risks, strengthen their security posture, and ensure adherence to regulatory standards such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001. 

Let’s take a granular look at each of these:

Governance: Governance establishes and outlines policies, processes, and rules that surround stakeholder responsibilities, operational ethics, and the alignment of corporate activities and organizational goals.

Risk management: Risk management, as the name suggests, is the element that involves identifying risks, assessing their impact, and deciding whether to accept, reject, mitigate, or transfer them, while implementing the appropriate controls.

Compliance: Compliance focuses on applying controls, policies, and procedures to meet regulatory standards and compliance requirements. Organizations gather evidence over time to demonstrate security posture during audits for standards like SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST, and PCI-DSS, based on the type of data handled and geographic location.

What is GRC Framework?

A GRC framework is a set of steps and processes that organizations use to efficiently manage governance, risk, and compliance (GRC). Breaking the process into smaller action items helps leadership identify and mitigate risks, implement impactful policies, and ensure compliance with legal requirements.

A key objective of the GRC framework is to ensure business best practices in everyday operations. It is used across functions like compliance officers, strategy makers, legal teams, IT departments, finance executives, data analysts, auditors, and more. 

Implementing a GRC Framework

Putting a GRC framework in place means unifying business components from bottom up to the implementation. While there is no right or wrong way, you may use these as a starting guide.

Here are 3 simple steps to implementing your GRC framework:

1) Identify Important Information & Establish Business Context

The first step to implementing a GRC framework is to assess where an organization stands in terms of people, processes, data, and technology. This helps avoid complications such as data duplicity or process workflows.

To do this, you need to: 

• Clearly define business objectives, key information assets, and critical processes that support these objectives. 
• Engage with stakeholders across departments 
• Create a comprehensive inventory of assets, data, regulatory requirements, and potential impacts of data loss or breaches.

2) Assess Inherent Risk (IR)

You can’t mitigate risks that you don’t know exist. Thus, it’s important to look at your systems – infra, cloud, process, and people – and identify the vulnerabilities, the attack pathways, and how much can it cost if these risks were to materialze. 

To do this: 

• Conduct qualitative or quantitative assessments, utilizing frameworks like FAIR (Factor Analysis of Information Risk).
• Identify specific threat vectors (e.g., cyberattacks, insider threats) and vulnerabilities associated with each asset.
• Quantify inherent risk using the formula: IR=Threat Likelihood×Impact

3) Map framework requirements to controls

Mapping framework requirements to controls involves aligning the specific requirements of a chosen regulatory or industry framework (such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, or NIST) with the organization’s implemented or planned 

Keep improving

Adopting a GRC framework is not a one-time task – you can’t set it up and forget about it. As market dynamics change, so are your targets. This means you should document new features, requirements, changes, and more.

GRC framework examples

GRC framework is  a set of technologies that help businesses implement policies, assess risks, eliminate silos, and get compliant. You can use these common frameworks to achieve these:

GRC solution

GRC software combines core business processes, risk management, auditing requirements, and internal controls into a single integrated application. It helps organizations systematically manage and implement functionalities centered around GRC to unify multiple business operations. 

User management

Stakeholders, employees, consultants, and other business associates need access to certain tools and files to carry out their tasks. These functions need access to specific systems using privileged or role based access control. User management helps to manage, control, and monitor access authorization to restrict everyone from accessing more than they need. 

Virtual CISO Services

A virtual or a vCISO offers remote services on a variety of security related tasks. It conducts risk assessments, improves the overall security posture, strategizes policies, implements controls, and more. vCISOs work with IT admins and top management to protect people, data, and the overall infrastructure from security threats. 

Auditing system

When you adopt a GRC framework, it is crucial to measure its efficiency to simplify compliance assessment. Audit managing tools help you map usage, manage controls, and collect evidence. You can use it to measure if your performance aligns with your goals. 

SIEM tools

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Tools help to gain a comprehensive insight into the information security ecosystem. It provides real time visibility into breach attempts, creates a log of system events consolidated from various sources, assists to investigate breaches, and alerts in case of incidents. Some SIEM tools can add to the system’s intelligence using historical data to draw correlation between events. 

Also. check out: Guide to implementing GRC compliance

Benefits and challenges of GRCs

Implementing GRC sure makes your life easier, but does not come without challenges. Expect to face these issues while adopting this framework:

Clash between existing practices and GRC 

Resistance is the natural outcome to change that can be expected in every organization – it is not a simple process. Implementing company wide GRC involves transformation at every stage – from employees to stakeholders. So if you expect a drastic shift overnight, it is crucial to change that mindset. 

Overestimating existing processes

Many leaders erroneously believe that their existing processes are mature enough to integrate with a GRC automated system. While a fully mature system is by no means a necessity, having a basic understanding of where you want your processes to be in the long run. This is because strong starting points lay the foundation to help you avoid errors and rework. So start by knowing your processes, people, and policies well. 

Siloed data

Companies without a centralized system for managing data across functions have separate processes to store and access data. As GRC changes the siloed data systems, many companies find themselves in a cesspool of duplicate data. This often ends up creating more challenges in managing information. 

Slow adaptation

As previously discussed, getting everyone onboard with new changes is easier said than done. Businesses depend on a number of processes for each operation – it is a complex system of IT, data, policies, assignees, etc. With GRC consolidating the use of spreadsheets, documents, and other tools, at times, we find a lack of visibility into who is accountable for what – and thus manual processes often continue.

Need for clarity

Your GRC journey won’t be successful if you fail to communicate relevant information with concerned parties. It is essential that you have a strategy to communicate policies, planning, and roles with employees and stakeholders. 

Once you overcome the challenges, you can reap the benefits. These include: 

Automation

A key goal of the GRC framework is to reduce manual efforts. Pre-GRC scenarios in most organizations involve using spreadsheets, documents, emails, and calls to manage daily functions. With GRC, companies experience a shift in reduced manual efforts to eliminate repeat tasks, automate workflows, analyze metrics, and process role based access. 

Transparency

Siloed functions within the infrastructure impedes full visibility into processes as departments work independently. GRC helps users gain comprehensive visibility for all involved parties to enhance their understanding of processes, data, risks, projects, and more. 

Efficiency

Assessing risks, managing compliance, and tracking internal audits are time-consuming, complex processes. GRC frameworks centralize these processes using a single tool. Additionally, it helps users manage and improve IT compliance and controls. 

Risk and security

GRC frameworks help businesses manage, implement, monitor, track, and automate risks. This empowers top management to make better decisions, set goals that align with dynamic market demands, and distribute resources to eliminate risks. 

A robust GRC program is particularly helpful for organizations that have previously struggled with compliance failure or security incidents. 

Onboarding and offboarding

Poor onboarding processes lead to bad employee experience and first impressions. GRC helps organizations automate the end to end onboarding and offboarding process for a seamless experience. 

What are the top 3 GRC tools?

With evolving regulations, emerging threats, and shrinking security budgets, it’s time to move beyond cookie-cutter GRC platforms. You need something nimble, efficient, and precise to navigate the tight turns with confidence. 

Thankfully, you have several options, and Sprinto, AuditBoard, and Secureframe are some of the leading platforms in the space.

Sprinto: Sprinto makes complying with all GRC regulations and frameworks as simple as 1-2-3. It comes baked-in with ready-to-launch compliance programs, customizable policy templates, and controls pre-mapped to frameworks. Integrate Sprinto with your systems, and start making strides towards audits with automated evidence collection, continuous control monitoring, and compliance tracking. 

With Sprinto, you build and scale world-class GRC programs at a fraction of the cost and effort.

Key Features:

• Ready-to-launch, auditor-grade compliance programs that come with controls pre-mapped to frameworks along with policy templates.  
• Automated evidence collection that eliminates audit fatigue by 90%. Sprinto syncs with your stack to automatically produce an inventory of your assets and test controls for their effectiveness, gathering evidence of control performance to build a clear audit trail. 
• Manage vendor risks with ease and greater control. Sprinto automatically discovers vendors in your cloud environment and creates automated checks, workflows, and protocols for iron-clad protection.
• Monitor control performance continuously and triage alerts in real time to curb compliance drift. 
• Assess risk with empirical rigor, prioritize better, and manage systematically. 

CTA: GRC programs built for fast-growing companies

AuditBoard: Streamlines audit and risk management with a user-friendly platform, ideal for managing audits and reporting. It also tests controls to provide visibility into risk and compliance progress, enabling more efficient decision-making.

Key features:

• Auditboard provides a centralized view of your compliance initiatives to enable better reporting and stakeholder alignment 
• Automates workflows to enhance efficiency and collaboration in auditing.
• Centralizes compliance tasks to ensure alignment with regulations.

Secureframe

Secureframe makes it easier to achieve and maintain compliance by automating evidence collection for security certifications like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and more, helping businesses meet regulatory standards efficiently.

Key features:

• Secureframe continuously monitors security controls, automating compliance across various frameworks.
• Simplifies creating, customizing, and managing security policies for compliance requirements.
• It lets you track and assess risks with a unified dashboard. 

Conclusion

While GRC frameworks offer a wide range of capabilities, it does not offer proactive risk assessment, continuous security monitoring, prioritize compliance requirements, scope risks and control measures. 

This is where comprehensive solutions like Sprinto squares up – this comprehensive solution essentially puts compliance on autopilot. It consolidates risks, maps controls, runs automated checks, trains employees, and simplifies access management. Talk to our experts about your business requirements. 

FAQs

How much does setting up a GRC framework cost?

GRC framework costs typically range from $20,000 to $80,000 and beyond, depending on the specific framework chosen—such as ISO 27001, SOC2, or NIST—as well as factors like your process maturity, the number of consultants engaged, and your technical stack.

What are the components of GRC security frameworks?

The components of the GRC framework are broadly divided into three major categories: governance, risk, and compliance. 

How to build a GRC framework?

You can build a GRC framework by following these steps: 

• Understand your existing processes and resources. 
• Set clear targets and goals. 
• Analyze existing gaps. 
• Discuss the plan with key stakeholders and top management.
• Choose a GRC partner
• Keep working on the necessary changes