Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) are three critical components businesses of all sizes must manage to comply with industry standards and regulations. GRC involves creating, implementing, and monitoring policies, procedures, and controls to mitigate risks and maintain transparency around compliance policies.

Large businesses usually have dedicated teams and advanced technologies to manage their GRC processes. However, small and medium-sized businesses often struggle to manage GRC effectively due to their limited resources. They may hire experts to manage GRC processes manually, but this may not be efficient, and there is a high risk of non-compliance. Investing in GRC software can help small and medium businesses streamline their processes, saving them time and money and avoiding non-compliance risks.

What is GRC Software?

GRC software is designed to help organizations manage and comply with laws and regulations by automating various GRC processes. It automates compliance obligations and tasks using workflows. It enables you to create controls and map them to regulatory and internal compliance requirements and helps you to mitigate risks. The solution, usually cloud-based, introduces automation for many processes, increasing efficiency and reducing complexity.

The software collects, centralizes, and manages compliance data from multiple sources, including internal systems, external sources, and third-party vendors. It ensures that the data is up-to-date and accurate, helping businesses stay compliant with laws and avoid expensive penalties. GRC software also helps identify trends, anomalies, and potential compliance issues with its real-time monitoring and reporting modules, allowing organizations to mitigate them in time.

Advantages of GRC Software

Stay on top of compliance, risk, and governance challenges

Robust GRC software aligns interconnected teams and information, even remotely, streamlines work, and leverages automation and systems to empower top-level management. With the help of pre-built workflows that tie together relevant tasks and alerts, GRC software enables front lines and top management to save time and effort from day one. It supports the challenges faced by top-level management, including corporate crisis management, risk management, HR, regulatory compliance, and audit planning challenges.

Better compliance data aggregation

It centralizes compliance data from multiple sources and automates data aggregation and centralization, eliminating manual intervention. This ensures that data is up-to-date and accurate, helping organizations comply with laws and regulations. GRC software helps identify trends, anomalies, and potential compliance issues with real-time monitoring and reporting modules, allowing organizations to mitigate them in time.

Evidence Management for Compliance

GRC software’s automation capabilities help organizations manage evidence – automatically collecting, storing, and managing compliance-related evidence in a central repository. It gathers training records and incident reports, allowing organizations to smoothly comply with laws and regulations in real time during an audit or inspection. Organizations can also automate compliance-related processes like incident reporting and policy management, reducing delays and bringing compliance issues to immediate attention.

Build Relationships with Regulators

GRC software helps organizations demonstrate compliance, helping them build more credibility with compliance regulators. With real-time reporting and monitoring capabilities, organizations can identify and report on compliance issues immediately. Simply having all the compliance data required in a centralized repository and being audit-ready at all times helps build trust with regulators.

Make policies accessible

GRC software can help organizations create more accessible regulations by automating the creation, storage, and updating of policies and procedures. This makes it easier for employees to find and understand the information they need to comply with regulations. GRC software makes policies accessible to employees on a central repository, allowing them to access information and documents securely through an intranet platform.

Risk Assessment for Proactive Mitigation

GRC software lets organizations identify, evaluate, and mitigate risks, automating risk assessments to identify vulnerabilities or potential threats. It further uses data analytics to understand the impact of those risks, allowing organizations to act immediately.

In recent years, the pressure on GRC professionals to quickly communicate the scale and impact of risk events has increased significantly. Supply chain disruptions, pandemics, extreme weather conditions, war, and new regulations demand swift and accurate communication. Furthermore, risks have become more interconnected, with events affecting reputational, operational, social, third-party, and cybersecurity areas.

Disparate GRC Systems Cannot Provide a Holistic Picture

Disparate GRC systems and data cannot provide a complete picture of risks, and periodic assessments and audits are inadequate in an ever-changing world. Therefore, it is necessary to reconsider traditional GRC programs and technologies and opt for an integrated, best-practice GRC solution that offers a holistic view of risks and compliance across the enterprise. This approach can help organizations prepare for risk events, recover from disruptions, and automate and streamline compliance assessments, internal audits, and continuous risk monitoring.

How to Choose GRC Software/Tools?

When it comes to GRC software, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution that will work for every business. The software you choose should align with your organization’s goals. For example, if you’re a new business just starting your GRC journey, you may want to consider basic compliance and risk assessment software. However, it’s important to consider your future needs as your organization grows and scales. As your risk data, regulatory obligations, third-party relationships, and audit requirements become more complex, investing in a scalable solution that can adapt and grow with your business is a better long-term choice. On the other hand, if your organization already has an established GRC program, an integrated GRC platform that centralizes data, provides a common language, and enables advanced reporting and analytics can help you accelerate your GRC journey.

Strengthen Your Organization’s Performance Using VComply’s Integrated GRC Approach

The VComply GRC platform offers a comprehensive view of risk management, internal audit, compliance, and internal controls across the entire organization. It provides a centralized framework that maps risks to various data elements, such as compliance requirements and internal controls allowing users to view risks holistically and contextually.

VComply also standardizes risk, compliance and controls taxonomies, making communication and reporting on risks more consistent across teams. This eliminates duplication of effort and information, allowing for optimal efficiency. The product simplifies control testing, oversight, evidence management with systematic workflows, rationalizing controls, and reducing compliance efforts and costs. Real-time reporting enables teams to deliver swift assurance around various compliance frameworks, strengthening stakeholder confidence.
It lets organizations conduct compliance risk assessment periodically or more frequently in case of significant changes to the risk profile or changes in compliance laws and regulations. The platform also simplifies regulatory change tracking by allowing the company to map regulatory obligations to policies, risks, and controls.

VComply offers a centralized repository for policy management, allowing the company to easily store and access the latest policies. This has helped streamline and simplify the creation and communication of organizational policies. Additionally, mapping policies to regulations, risks, and controls have significantly strengthened compliance while highlighting potential risks.

VComply Internal Audit Management helps the company improve its audit productivity while quickly identifying and responding to risks. The product supports a risk-based approach to auditing, enabling teams to prioritize and direct audit resources to the highest risk areas. By integrating auditing with compliance, teams across both functions can effectively coordinate control testing activities to minimize redundancies. The platform also strengthens visibility into audit findings, helping the audit team deliver valued, trusted advice to the board and leadership.

VComply’s powerful analytics, reports, and dashboards give the organizations in-depth visibility into risks, internal audit results,  compliance findings, and internal controls. Decision-makers can leverage rich visualizations of the data to understand the top risks, issues, and opportunities, across risk, internal audit, compliance, and more. The result is a strategic view of the company’s overall governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) posture, enabling leadership teams to make better-informed decisions.