Integrating Data Into Your GRC Workflow Solution

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The limitation of workflow solutions

Risk and Compliance are at the core of every business process. When an organization explores new markets, new products, partnerships, M&As — or anything else really — management teams depend on Risk and Compliance reports for critical decision-making.

But the role of GRC teams is becoming more challenging every day. Tech stacks keep growing in complexity at an unprecedented pace, and so do evolving regulations and requirements.

Many teams use GRC workflow solutions to try to keep up with the changes and automate some of their processes. Existing solutions can streamline tasks like risk assessment reminders, alerts, and notifications, reducing redundancies. And while these solutions can provide your team with value, there are key areas where improvements can be made:

1. Increased efficiency

While workflow solutions automate certain processes, they don’t solve the most time-consuming and critical task: evidence collection. Manually collecting static evidence diverts your valuable resources from GRC functions and wastes resources across the entire organization. 

As your team members track down evidence from stakeholders, those stakeholders have to take time out of their day to deliver the material you need. Too often, they’ll have to resubmit evidence multiple times before it meets the relevant requirements.

2. Greater visibility

When your organization collects static evidence in the form of manually collected screenshots, you’re literally relying on snapshots. Point-in-time documents don’t provide a complete or up-to-date view of your current GRC posture, leaving you with no way of continuously monitoring your controls. 

This limited visibility leaves you vulnerable to blind spots and unable to attest to your true state of compliance.

3. More accurate information

Screenshots, spreadsheets, and PDFs provided by the stakeholders are, at best, accurate for the moment they were taken. When used as the basis for reports sent to the Risk & Compliance Committee, CISO/CIO, GRC department, and other stakeholders, this point-in-time data can negatively impact decision-making throughout the organization and compromise the overall processes.

GRC data is the key to efficient automation

One solution helps teams overcome all three limitations of workflow solutions: Enhancing their solution with automatically-collected, credible GRC data-evidence. A continuous flow of GRC data ensures the integrity of the reports and information they provide to the organization while reducing their workload.

What exactly is GRC data?

Simply put, GRC data is systems data collected from the organization’s tech stack, structured and contextualized for use in GRC. GRC data truly increases efficiency because you can apply the same data-evidence to multiple GRC use cases and workflows, something that you can’t do with screenshots or even raw data from a single source.

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GRC data has three main attributes:

1. Consistency

GRC depends on knowing what data artifacts are needed from each source, such as dev tools, ticketing systems, and cloud infrastructures. Anecdotes creates clarity and confidence in what teams need to satisfy requirements across their compliance program.

2. Clarity 

The data needs to be presented in a user-friendly and actionable way. Anecdotes, for example, delivers data in a simple and intuitive table structure. This view provides a clear understanding of the data, and since it’s a live table, organizations can segment, scope, filter, and analyze the data to meet business objectives.

3. Credibility

Since GRC’s impact stems from its credibility, which depends on irrefutable integrity. GRC data must be standardized, immutable, and traceable if it’s going to be trusted by the entire ecosystem. Each dataset must be delivered with bulletproof IPE.

GRC data is designed for reuse in any relevant use case. For example, an organization can perform user access reviews with a user list and configuration originally collected to demonstrate multifactor authentication. Data artifacts showing how the backups used in production across multiple environments are encrypted can also be mapped to set the impact level of the "data loss risk entity" in a risk register. The possibilities are endless.

GRC data for your existing solution

Workflow automation solutions depend on inputs of information, or evidence. With the introduction of the Anecdotes GRC Data Engine, companies have a choice: keep dedicating resources to manually inputting the same static evidence, or upgrade to automatically-collected GRC data.

How does it work?

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Step 1: Integrate systems in scope with your new Anecdotes instance

Anecdotes’ dedicated integration development team has built over 190 (and counting) custom integrations with the most popular tools and cloud environments. Our GRC experts have mapped the precise evidence you need from each integration. Once you connect the plugin with a few simple steps, the integration will regularly and automatically collect the right data.

Step 2: Set up the integration between Anecdotes and your solution

The setup is a little different for each solution, but essentially, you just need to create the connection between Anecdotes and the GRC solution you use. From then on, Anecdotes will feed your solution a continuous flow of GRC data from across your tech stack.

Step 3: Connect your GRC data to any workflow

Now that your GRC data is centralized in your solution, all you have to do is connect it to your existing workflows. This will also vary from one solution to the next and will depend on the type of workflows you are managing in the tool. Once connected, Anecdotes will automatically populate your solution with up-to-date, credible GRC data — without any additional steps!

Eliminate the frustration of working without data

GRC data handily addresses the three main limitations of workflow solutions: limited efficiency, restricted visibility, and inaccurate information. Automated evidence collection does away with time-intensive manual evidence collection processes. The regular cadence of data collection and standardization of the data create a continuous view of your GRC posture. And since GRC data is complete and credible, decision-makers across the organization can count on it to make well-informed decisions. 

Key benefits of enhancing your solution with GRC data

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