What is ServiceNow Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC)? Everything You Need to Know

Organizations still use fragmented tools and manual processes to manage governance, risk, and compliance (GRC). In fact, around 40% of businesses use basic tools such as spreadsheets to manage risk and compliance processes, according to the NorthRow compliance report. This leads to inefficiencies, potential risks, and compliance gaps.

As the global regulatory environment evolves and new threats emerge, this kind of approach is not sustainable. Without a unified system, assessing compliance and risks across organizations is quite a challenging and reactive exercise.

Organizations require a unified platform that streamlines GRC processes, provides real-time visibility into risk posture, and empowers a proactive approach. It is the power of ServiceNow GRC.

To help you learn more about this platform, this blog dives deep into ServiceNow GRC overview, its key features, use cases, and how it benefits businesses.

What is ServiceNow GRC?

ServiceNow Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) is a cloud-based platform that focuses on unifying and automating GRC processes across an organization.

In simple terms, it is a single platform for all sizes of organizations from small businesses to large enterprises, providing a holistic view of governance, risk, and compliance.

What Is Included in the ServiceNow GRC Module?

ServiceNow GRC module is a suite of applications within the ServiceNow platform that help organizations manage GRC. Here is the breakdown of the tools that are included in the GRC module and how they can help:

Integrated Risk Management (IRM)

Integrated Risk Management enables organizations with a unified view of all risks including financial, operational, compliance, and IT. It empowers businesses with improved visibility and risk-informed decisions (based on risk scores low, moderate, and high) with real-time intelligence. IRM capabilities include:

Policy and Compliance Management: It helps businesses in the automation and management of policy lifecycle and monitor compliance continuously.

Operational Risk Management: It allows businesses to focus on risks related to day-to-day operations such as human errors and fraud, leading to reduced operational losses. It offers risk control self-assessment, control assurance (testing), and continuous monitoring to quickly identify changes in risk profile.

Continuous Authorization and Monitoring (CAM): Businesses can continuously assess the security posture of applications and systems with this feature. It makes authorization faster with automated risk management framework processes and provides real-time visibility into potential security risks.

Regulatory Change Management: It enables businesses to keep pace with today’s complex regulatory environment and assess the latest regulations’ impact on existing risks and control. By reducing manual processes of regulatory compliance with automated workflows and compliance mapping, businesses can increase productivity.

Audit Management: It helps organizations prioritize internal audits using risk data and eliminate repeat audit findings. Also, it allows them to identify issues with continuous compliance monitoring and increase the productivity of respective teams by reducing manual efforts.

Performance Analytics: With this, businesses can monitor day-to-day operations performances and detect bottlenecks before they occur for improvement. It helps prioritize resources and identify the areas where self-service and automation can enhance efficiency.

Virtual Agent: This capability of ServiceNow GRC enables organizations with an AI-powered conversational chatbot, making it easier for their employees and customers to resolve issues promptly without waiting.

Reporting and Dashboards: The platform provides consolidated reporting and dashboards that provide a holistic view of risk across the organization. This enables organizations to track key risk indicators, monitor risk trends, and make informed decisions.

Business Continuity Management

Natural disasters, severe weather, IT outages, and supply chain disruptions have the potential to interpret business operations. Here, Business Continuity Management (BCM) tools help organizations prepare and respond to disruptions or disasters that could impact their operations.

BCM offers a crisis map that provides the latest satellite imagery for information like power outages, and flood zones to plan and respond. Here are the key capabilities that BCM includes:

Business Impact Analysis: It provides a structured approach to prioritize critical business functions and help identify dependencies on IT teams that can result in financial, reputation, and legal loss when disrupted.

Continuity Planning: This feature enables businesses to create plans to continue operating during and after a disruption or disaster. Also, it allows the identification of dependencies by mapping the relationship between critical business operations and resources (team members, systems).

Operational Resilience Management: This capability of BCM allows businesses with resilience management to identify vulnerabilities in critical business operations that can cause disruptions. Businesses can map the dependencies between IT systems and resources to develop plans for potential disruption scenarios.

Crisis Management: With this capability, organizations can execute recovery plans for disruptions, assign tasks to respective teams, and monitor their progress in real-time. Its emergency mass notification features enable businesses to notify the related resources (specific team members) through 25+ channels like text, phone, and email.

Privacy Management

ServiceNow GRC tool for privacy management enables businesses to identify and manage the privacy of personal and sensitive information while ensuring compliance with privacy regulations. With GRC applications, organizations can eliminate privacy risks and respond promptly to emerging threats.

Privacy Case Management: It is a centralized system to manage privacy incidents and requests. This workflow allows organizations to track privacy violations quickly and ensures timely assessment and handling of any breaches while maintaining compliance.

Agnostic Frameworks: It allows organizations to import and manage any privacy regulations (such as HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA) within the platform. It enables them to adapt to evolving privacy regulations without the extensive customization requirements.

Control Testing Automation: It automates the process of testing privacy control effectiveness by replacing manual methods with continuous monitoring. Businesses get ongoing visibility to identify and address compliance issues proactively.

Response Triggered Actions: This capability enables organizations to define automated actions triggered by specific events related to privacy risks. It allows to automatically initiate event response workflows on a data breach and trigger actions to mitigate privacy risks.

Processing Activity Identification: It helps businesses identify and manage all process activities involving personal data (type of data processed and purpose of processing). It provides a clear understanding of how personal data is used within the organization by using a record of processing activities (ROPA) as required by GDPR.

Privacy Impact Assessment: It helps organizations assess the privacy risks associated with services or products and how the personal data of employees, customers, and third parties is collected, stored, used, accessed, and shared.

Privacy Lifecycle Management: It enables businesses to automate the approval and review process of privacy policy and help manage the entire lifecycle including creation, review, approval, and retirement.

Third-Party Risk Management

It helps businesses manage the potential risks associated with using third-party vendors. It ensures reducing risks by collecting and assessing information about potential vendors, evaluating the risk, and managing vendor contracts. Here are the key capabilities of this ServiceNow GRC feature.

Onboarding and Offboarding: This feature enables businesses to automate the process of onboarding third-party vendors by performing due diligence, risk assessments, and contract management.

Third-Party Portal: This capability allows businesses to connect with third parties in a single place for all risk management activities. They can reduce manual efforts and provide a self-service portal to vendors to submit information and compliance certifications.

Third-Party Portfolio Management: It eliminates the need for spreadsheets to manage vendors’ data and allows businesses to store third-party data in a single database.

Issue Management and Remediation: It helps organizations track and manage identified issues related to third parties. It allows businesses to design remediation plans and communicate with vendors in real time to resolve issues faster.

Aggregated Risk Scores: This feature provides organizations with a clear view of the overall risk posed by each vendor. It enables them to identify trends in third-party risks and prioritize risk mitigation efforts.

These are the key features included in the ServiceNow GRC modules.

ServiceNow Governance Risk and Compliance Use Cases

GRC in ServiceNow provides organizations with the tools for seamless business operations without compromising regulatory compliance. It has various use cases as follows:

Streamline Internal Audit Workflows

GRC eliminates manual audit processes and allows audit teams to plan and schedule audits more efficiently. With its centralized systems, businesses can get audit-related information in a single place, providing real-time visibility into audits to track progress and identify issues.

Identity Potential Risks

Organizations can centralize risk data and automate assessments with ServiceNow GRC tools. It will help businesses get a comprehensive and updated view of risk posture. The platform also provides risk assessment methods and scoring frameworks that help identify high-priority risks requiring immediate actions.

Integrate with Other ServiceNow Products

ServiceNow GRC can seamlessly integrate with other applications such as ServiceNow ITSM and HR Service Delivery, leading to breaking down data silos, streamlining data sharing, and increasing collaboration across different teams. It facilitates workflow automation like automatically assigning tasks to relevant teams.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

ServiceNow governance risk and compliance provide tools to help businesses plan, test, and execute business continuity and disaster recovery plans. It facilitates the business impact analysis process that helps businesses identify important functions and functionality. GRC provides tools to develop disaster recovery plans including the steps to restore these systems in disaster cases.

Compliance with Regulation

Businesses operate in environments with ever-evolving regulatory compliance (such as GDPR, SOX, and HIPAA). ServiceNow GRC provides a centralized repository that includes all relevant regulations, industry standards, and internet policies. With its real-time compliance monitoring dashboard and reports, businesses can get real-time visibility into compliance status and address potential issues. Companies can also streamline the audit process with tools like planning, scheduling, executing, and reporting.

These ServiceNow GRC use cases allow businesses to streamline their GRC processes.

Conclusion

In the current dynamic business landscape, managing evolving risk and compliance is no longer a choice but becomes a necessity for businesses to succeed. ServiceNow GRC provides an integrated and automated platform to transform the organization’s approach to GRC, moving beyond manual and siloed systems.

To ensure getting the utmost benefits with this, leveraging Cyntexa’s ServiceNow consulting services will guide you navigate the complexities of modern business problems. Our experts help you choose the right tools and utilize their capabilities to manage risk and compliance structures.