Given the constantly evolving regulatory landscape in today’s hyper-volatile world, cyber risks are at large, and disruptive business threats have the potential to strike at any time, effective Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) isn’t a discretionary expense-it is a must-end. Do you feel behind the curve, struggling with inefficient data silos, manual processes, and a reactive approach to risk management? Are you ready to evolve your GRC program from a cost center into a strategic asset where your organization thrives? It’s time to unlock the transformative power of ServiceNow GRC.
Far beyond the capabilities of a simple compliance checklist, ServiceNow Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) is a unified, cloud-based platform designed to streamline your GRC processes, automate key tasks, gain real-time visibility into your risk posture, and integrate risk management into the very fabric of your organization. This blog post delves into 9 exceptional and actionable use cases that showcase how ServiceNow GRC can revolutionize your GRC program, moving you beyond a basic GRC module in ServiceNow and making you empowered to command your risk universe with confidence.
Why ServiceNow GRC?
Because in this increasingly complex, constantly changing, and increasingly integrated business environment, it’s simply not enough just to “check the boxes”. You need an integrated, active, and truly proactive GRC program that gives you the anticipation of threats and the mitigation and seizure of opportunity in the dynamic agility and resiliency way. In brief, integrated GRC helps an organization make swift decisions for better excellence.
The 9 Exceptional Use Cases: Transformation of GRC from Reactive to Revolutionary
1. Enterprise Risk Management: Achieving a 360-Degree View of Risk
The Challenge:
Organizations often suffer from siloed risk data, inconsistent risk assessments, and lack of executive-level visibility into the top enterprise risks. Different departments may be using different methodologies, tools, and data sources for managing risks, which creates fragmented insights and gives a distorted view of the overall risk landscape. Executives lack real-time visibility into top enterprise risks and cannot make the right decisions at the right time to allocate the right resources.
ServiceNow GRC Solution:
It allows the identification, evaluation, prioritization, and response to risk at all organizational levels from a centralized platform. The GRC module ServiceNow shops often implement lets you:
- Create a common risk taxonomy and methodology across all departments.
- Automate the process of risk assessment by using standardized templates and questionnaires.
- Risk data can be visualized using interactive dashboards and reports.
- Track the effectiveness of risk mitigation strategies.
Example Scenario:
A global financial institution leverages ServiceNow GRC to map all of its operational, financial, regulatory, and strategic risks into one integrated system. Senior management receives real-time visibility into which risks pose the greatest threat: cybersecurity threats, regulatory changes, or economic downturns. Armed with this insight, they can make more informed decisions on how to allocate resources, which investment strategies to employ, and where to apply risk mitigation efforts. They can also evaluate if their risk strategies align with the priorities of their business.
Actionable Insight:
Use ServiceNow GRC to generate a risk heat map that describes the top risks of your organization by their likelihood and impact. Use this to present to senior management for informed risk appetite and resource allocation discussions.
2. Policy and Compliance Management: Enforcing Standards, Ensuring Adherence
The Challenge:
The sheer volume of policies and procedures across the enterprise, tracking compliance by employees and policy exceptions is a logistical challenge. It involves manual processes prone to error, difficult to audit, and simply not scalable for growth or changing regulatory environments.
ServiceNow GRC Solution:
Enabling you to create, administer, distribute, and enforce policies and procedures throughout the enterprise so that employees are held accountable for obligations, and the organization is compliant with all relevant regulations and standards.
You can apply ServiceNow GRC to handle risks associated with supply chain and vendor management. This will ensure that there is consistency and alignment among departments and you can apply this solution in:
- Centralize policy documentation in a searchable repository.
- Automate policy distribution and tracking of acknowledgement.
- Conduct regular reviews and updates of policies.
- Manage policy exceptions and track remediation efforts.
Example Scenario:
A healthcare organization uses ServiceNow GRC to manage its HIPAA compliance program. The system automatically distributes the organization’s privacy policy to all employees and tracks their acknowledgement. It also monitors access to patient records, flags suspicious activity, and automates audits of security controls.
Actionable Insight:
Automate acknowledgement workflows for policy acceptance across the entire employee base to document that all employees read and understood key policies. Use ServiceNow GRC to create reports with the percentage of the employed base who acknowledged each policy and which policies still need acknowledgement.
3. Audit Management: Streamlining the audit lifecycle, reducing cost, and maximizing assurance
The Challenge:
Auditing is a time-consuming, expensive, and manual process that is often characterized by numerous spreadsheets, emails, and meetings. Auditors cannot easily collect the evidence needed to track progress or communicate findings effectively.
ServiceNow GRC Solution:
It automates and streamlines all phases of the audit lifecycle, starting with planning and scoping to fieldwork, reporting, and follow-up. This allows you to facilitate internal audit teams in effectively managing the entire audit lifecycle, including planning, risk assessment, project management, and reporting. Automate tasks, streamline workflows, and collaborate more effectively between auditors and auditees.
Example Scenario:
An energy company is employing ServiceNow GRC to manage their environmental compliance audit. The system provides automation in data collection from sensor, meters, and databases, schedules audit activities, assigns tasks to the individual auditors, tracks findings and remediation efforts in a central repository, and stores them.
Actionable Insight:
Utilize ServiceNow GRC to make a standardized template for an audit plan, along with pre-configured tasks, timelines, and responsibilities. It will ensure the consistency and efficiency of all the audits.
4. Vendor Risk Management: Managing Third-Party Risks Mitigates Risks for Supply Chain Vulnerability to Your Organization
The Challenge:
Assessing and managing the risks associated with third-party vendors is becoming increasingly complex and critical. Organizations rely on a growing network of vendors to provide essential services, manage sensitive data, and access critical systems. A vendor security breach, compliance violation, or operational disruption can have a significant impact on your business.
ServiceNow GRC Solution:
The Vendor Risk Management solution focuses on the assessment and management of risks associated with third-party vendors. It streamlines the process by enabling organizations to configure assessments, validate responses, and create reports to help reduce your risk exposure from vendors.
Example Scenario:
A retail company utilizes ServiceNow GRC to determine the cyber security risks associated with its cloud service providers. The system asks the vendors to complete a standardized risk assessment questionnaire. These questions will range from data security and access controls to incident response and business continuity. Then, the company will analyze these responses, validate the information for accuracy, and assign a risk score to the respective vendors.
Actionable Insight:
Implement a tiered approach to vendor risk management. Prioritize that for the vendors who pose the biggest risks to your business. ServiceNow GRC will thus automate the entire process to assess low risks, while more extensive reviews will be done for high risks and their vendors.
5. IT Risk Management: Protection of the Digital Assets with Continuity of Businesses
Today, the concern about monitoring and mitigating IT risks, like data breaches, system outages, and compliance violations, becomes an issue that many organizations are increasingly concerned about, regardless of size. With these complexities, interconnectedness makes it difficult to pinpoint, assess, and respond appropriately to possible threats.
ServiceNow GRC Solution:
The IT Risk Management application in ServiceNow enables an organization to continuously monitor risks that may adversely affect the business operations. Monitor critical vulnerabilities and assess business implications.
Example Scenario:
A financial institution uses ServiceNow GRC to monitor its network for security vulnerabilities, automate the patching process, and track compliance with cybersecurity policies. The system automatically scans the network for vulnerabilities, prioritizes them based on their severity and potential impact, and assigns remediation tasks to the appropriate IT teams.
Actionable Insight:
Leverage automated vulnerability scanning and patching to minimize your organization’s exposure to known security threats. Utilize ServiceNow GRC to monitor remediation activities against vulnerabilities to ensure that critical ones are remediated in a timely manner.
6. Business Continuity Planning: Resilience in the Face of Disruption
The Challenge:
Making comprehensive business continuity plans is a complex and time-consuming undertaking, such that any critical business operations can be sustained in case of disruptions like natural disasters, pandemics, or cyberattacks. Traditional BCP processes tend to rely on outdated data, lack clear ownership, and are challenging to test thoroughly.
ServiceNow GRC Solution:
Automates key aspects of Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR), enabling you to identify critical business processes and their dependence on IT systems, infrastructure, and personnel
Develop recovery plans for each business process, in which the critical steps to resume operations in the event of disruption are described.
- Test and simulation regularly to test the effectiveness of your BCP plans
- Status tracking of the BCP activity and identification of areas for improvement.
Example Scenario:
A manufacturing company uses ServiceNow GRC to document its critical business processes, including order fulfillment, production, and shipping. The system identifies the dependencies on IT systems (e.g., ERP, CRM, supply chain management), infrastructure (e.g., servers, networks, power), and personnel (e.g., key employees, suppliers). It also develops recovery plans for each scenario with the necessary steps to restore operations in case of a disruption.
Actionable Insight:
Use ServiceNow GRC to perform a BIA to identify your organization’s most critical business processes and their dependencies. Focus your BCP efforts on protecting these critical processes and minimizing their potential downtime.
7. HR Policy Compliance and Onboarding Risk Mitigation: Protecting Your Workforce, Minimizing Legal Exposures
The Challenge:
It is not easy to track the HR policy requirements, identify potential onboarding risks, and ensure compliance with labor laws. Non-compliance with HR policies and labor laws can lead to fines, lawsuits, and damage to reputation at a significant cost.
ServiceNow GRC Solution:
IRM can monitor activity across solutions, automatically alerting the proper teams when there is a compliance concern, tracking that concern through resolution, and proving your organization has followed all requirements. You can enhance tracking HR policy requirements, finding potential onboarding risks, and making sure labor laws compliance.
Example Scenario:
An HR manager monitors compliance efforts by using a ServiceNow dashboard. It tracks the risks of onboarding due to HR tasks closed but not completed, ensures that new employees sign the required NDAs, and checks if they have completed their mandatory diversity training. The system flags any compliance gaps and automatically sends reminders to the concerned stakeholders.
Actionable Insight:
Automate onboarding workflows so that all new hires are compliant with the necessary HR policies and training modules. Use ServiceNow GRC to track completion rates and identify non-compliant employees.
8. Incident Management: Responding Quickly and Effectively to Security Breaches and Other Disruptions
The Challenge:
Incidents and breaches are very challenging to manage, and also conducting root cause analysis and communicating with stakeholders forms a pretty big task. Incidents and breaches that are not efficiently managed lead to data loss, financial losses, reputational damage, and legal liabilities.
ServiceNow GRC Solution:
The GRC Solution for ServiceNow encompasses tools to handle incidents and breaches, such as tracking and resolving incidents, conducting root cause analysis, and informing stakeholders. This platform allows teams to address incidents and breaches effectively and rapidly so that business operations are less impacted.
Example Scenario:
A company can use the GRC module in ServiceNow to manage and mitigate risks that are related to patient privacy and data security. It can mean setting up automatic alerts going out when potential PII breaches occur besides automatically alerting stakeholders.
Actionable Insight:
You can use the root cause of the incident for future reference to mitigate similar instances.
9. Configuration Compliance: Proactively Protecting Your Digital Assets
The Challenge:
Managing security posture across all digital systems and data becomes more and more complex everyday. It can be difficult to keep up with the latest vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and compliance requirements.
ServiceNow GRC Solution:
It detects and corrects misconfigurations proactively, preventing the business from getting exposed to risks. Then the IRM Configuration Compliance application maps the failed configuration test results with assets in the ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB).
Example Scenario:
If the database is not using an approved version, it is corrected and documented. Server has missing security patches, the server immediately detects and gives alerts. Public cloud storage system left open to the public is addressed on high priority.
Actionable Insight:
Remediate first based on the severity of the vulnerability and the criticality of the system being affected. Automate remediation tasks to be assigned to the right teams, and track the remediation efforts.
Command Your Risk Universe: The Time to Act is Now
ServiceNow GRC gives you the power to take charge of your risk universe, making GRC no longer a reactive burden but an enabler for proactive action. With its rich functionality and tools, it’s one of the great resources any organization can leverage for strengthening their efforts in risk and compliance management. By embracing these 9 fantastic use cases, you will have a GRC program that makes business value while protecting your organization from harm to thrive in the complex, dynamic world.
Is it time for you to take control of your risk universe?
Reach out to us today and discuss your GRC goals. Let our expert consultants in ServiceNow help you create a GRC solution ideally suited to your needs. We will help bridge the divide between security and IT so that you can integrate a risk program for ongoing monitoring. Take a demo today!
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