Unify GRC Strategy Development with Key Objectives for Business Success

This blog provides a comprehensive approach to GRC strategy development and implementation, focusing on aligning governance, risk and compliance initiatives with business objectives to enhance organizational efficiency and compliance.

A CIO or CTO has to combine the skills of an engineer, the determination of a military general, and the foresight of a master chess player — just to keep the business running smoothly. One of the most effective tools in their arsenal can be a cyber GRC strategy. You can use GRC strategy development to identify, assess and manage risk while ensuring you satisfy both internal and external compliance requirements.

At the same time, a proactive strategy creates an environment where your teams can focus more on growth than working “defensively” — creating robust solutions instead of merely trying to avoid mistakes.

Here, we explore the basics of developing a GRC strategy, pinpointing the organizational needs that drive it, and integrating it into your general business flow.

Understand GRC Strategy Development

GRC strategy development refers to building a framework around governance, risk and compliance (GRC) management objectives. Using this strategy, you ensure that your organization’s objectives and GRC efforts complement each other, working hand-in-hand to accomplish the same goals.

Developing a GRC strategy is a crucial element of risk management because it puts all employees, managers, and other stakeholders on the same page when it comes to preventing and mitigating GRC-related risks. An effective GRC strategy can foster a culture of proactive risk management among all stakeholders. A solid strategy also ensures you have the right technology to automate and integrate GRC-connected tasks and processes. In this way, you create a system that’s both comprehensive and efficient.

How GRC Strategy Aligns with Business Objectives

In many ways, GRC strategy is the foundation of other business objectives. Through governance, your GRC initiatives set up controls that guide important business decisions. By managing risk, your GRC strategy prevents financial, third-party, cyber, and other risks from halting operations or negating hard-earned profits. Through a compliance management program, you ensure your policies, practices, and digital infrastructure align with standards set up by regulatory bodies, customers and internal policy.

Identify Organizational GRC Needs

Building your GRC strategy starts with determining how GRC-related concerns may impact your organization. You can do this systematically by following these steps:

• Define organizational goals and objectives to ensure alignment among all stakeholders and clarify how a GRC strategy can help the organization achieve its goals
• Assess your environment to identify your organization’s risks, both internal and external
• Identify the compliance requirements that apply to your business sector and jurisdiction
• Review existing policies, procedures, standards and controls to determine whether updates are required and where you may have gaps
• Determine what risk and compliance reporting requirements are in place and whether you have the data, processes, and systems to support those requirements

Roles like risk and compliance analysts can support this early-stage discovery by collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data from risk assessments, audits and regulatory reviews. GRC leads can also help drive cross-functional alignment between compliance and governance functions.

Tools That Help Identify Organizational Needs

You don’t have to start your GRC strategy from scratch because there are plenty of tools available, such as:

• Risk assessment and integrated risk management software. These solutions often have presets that include risks endemic to your business sector. They also have frameworks guiding you to pinpoint the most pressing risks.
• GRC professionals. By engaging with GRC professionals — including internal or fractional support like a risk manager or GRC lead — your organization can lean on their industry experience and GRC expertise to gain insight into GRC best practices, determine what GRC software solutions could be a good fit for your organization, and determine the best path forward for building and executing on your GRC strategy.
• SWOT analysis. Practical strategy-building techniques, such as strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis, can help you get started. A SWOT analysis can provide valuable insights and decision-making guidance when developing a GRC strategy. It can help to identify areas of strength, areas for improvement, potential risks, and opportunities that can be leveraged to support effective GRC.
• Analytical and BI software. Using analytical and business intelligence (BI) software, such as Power BI or Tableau, can make it far easier to identify patterns that signify a need for GRC strategies for specific areas of your business.

Steps to Develop a GRC Strategy

Not surprisingly, GRC strategy development requires a strategic approach. Here are some straightforward steps to streamline the process for you and your team:

1. Establish your objectives. Often, this means focusing on specific systems that may face compliance issues or risk. In some cases, more you need more governance to reduce errors or foster consistent results.
2. Examine what you already have in place and identify gaps. Inconsistent practices, security vulnerabilities, or compliance issues, and end results of varying quality are typically signs of gaps.
3. Build out your policies. Decide which policies to implement based on regulatory guidelines and your organization’s goals.
4. Set up a formally documented control framework. Effectively implemented controls keep actions by people and digital systems from exposing you to unnecessary risks.
5. Build a team and allocate the proper resources to develop and implement your strategy. Roles such as risk managers and GRC leads are instrumental in translating your strategy into actionable governance workflows. When you pinpoint your team and necessary resources, reach out to stakeholders to glean their thoughts and gather feedback.

Another important consideration is prioritizing your GRC initiatives. This centers around asking questions like:

• Which systems expose our organization to the most risk?
• Which compliance standards are the most important to address now, especially to avoid legal or financial troubles?
• Which immediate needs and quick win use cases should we prioritize to ensure our GRC program delivers early value and builds momentum among stakeholders?
• How do we plan around competing internal priorities and limited budget and resources to ensure the successful implementation of our GRC strategy?

Incorporate GRC Strategy into Business Processes

By weaving GRC strategy into daily business practices, you can create a proactive risk management culture within your organization. Over time, this approach will reduce risk across the board and enable more efficient GRC operations.

As a simple example, suppose your dev team traditionally builds its solutions in the cloud. While cloud development has many advantages, it also exposes your development process to a few risks, such as platform downtime from interrupted internet connections, slow upload and download speeds when traffic is high, and, in some cases, slower iterations for testing.

With a formal risk identification and mitigation strategy, you can properly document and address these risks to determine the best way to handle them. To mitigate this risk, you might identify an integrated development environment (IDE) that lives on each dev’s laptop but also updates to the cloud. If you have an on-premise server, you can also institute twice-daily backups of the most recent, stable iterations of software in the pipeline.

GRC Software and Tools that Help with Strategy

A GRC tool can play a significant role in effective GRC strategy development. It can help your organization centralize GRC data, automate processes, integrate functions, generate reports and data analytics, and improve stakeholder collaboration and communication.

Implementing a GRC tool can help your organization manage risks, comply with regulations and standards, and streamline compliance activities. This leads to greater transparency, efficiency, and accountability, reducing the likelihood of material risks, compliance issues, and associated costs.

There are dozens of options in the marketplace, with different strengths and weaknesses, coming in at different price points. When establishing your GRC strategy, an important step is to perform a thorough tool evaluation and vendor selection process to ensure you identify the GRC tool that is the right fit for your organization’s personnel, budget and unique GRC requirements.

When considering a GRC tool, your focus should typically include the following features, weighted against how important each feature is to your organization:

Standard GRC tool features

• Risk management: Does the tool allow for identifying, assessing and managing risks throughout the organization, including third-party risk management?
• Compliance management: Does the tool provide capabilities for managing and tracking the compliance obligations that impact your organization?
• Policy management: Can the tool create, review and distribute policies within the organization?
• Audit management: Does the tool provide capabilities for managing and tracking audit activities, including identifying gaps and issues and facilitating remediation efforts?
• Business continuity management: Does the tool provide capabilities for managing and planning business continuity and disaster recovery activities?
• Issues management: Does the tool manage risk and compliance issues in a central and standardized location?
• Reporting and analytics: Does the tool meet your internal and external reporting needs? Can it generate and deliver comprehensive reports and analytics, enabling data-driven decision-making and continuous improvement?
• Integration capabilities: How easily does the tool integrate with other business systems, such as security information and event management (SIEM), identity and access management (IAM), and vulnerability management solutions?
• User experience: Is the tool user-friendly and simple to navigate to encourage employee adoption across different business groups and operational teams?
• Configuration and system administration: How easy is the tool to modify, configure and manage internally? What level of effort and expertise is required to manage the tool?
• Technical support and customer service: Does the vendor have a robust technical support and customer service program to ensure a smooth implementation and address any issues that arise during use? Are extra costs involved to ensure the level of technical support your organization requires?

Selecting the right GRC software also depends on the roles you assign to manage it. For example, a GRC lead may oversee tool implementation and reporting frameworks, while a risk and compliance analyst manages data entry, control testing, or audit tracking.

Start Building a Winning GRC Strategy Now

A GRC strategy shines brightest when integrated with your organization’s business practices and people’s daily tasks, helping keep risk mitigation and governance principles in mind.

You systemize consistency, high quality, and security across your organization. Embedding risk and compliance management into daily business operations can lead to benefits, including reduced risk, enhanced compliance, improved operational efficiency, and sharper, more informed decision-making.

A successful and sustainable GRC strategy requires collaboration from a broad team of stakeholders. By recruiting stakeholders from across the organization, you can gather diverse input and perspectives. It is crucial to be transparent from the outset about the changes that employees and managers can expect to see.

This transparency builds trust and fosters an environment where all stakeholders feel comfortable contributing to the GRC strategy. By creating an inclusive approach and setting expectations, you can set the stage for an effective and reliable GRC system that your teams will be more likely to embrace.

You know you need to protect your brand and financial stability by prioritizing cybersecurity. But do you know where to start? Our Cybersecurity team is ready to help you focus on everything from strategy development to penetration testing.

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