Governance, Risk and Compliance Services

CyberAssure governance, risk and compliance (GRC) services help clients tackle the broad issues of corporate governance, enterprise risk management, and effective corporate compliance, while offering specialized assistance in key areas such as financial reporting, tax, information technology, human capital, anti-fraud and dispute consulting, and financial advisory services. We can help organizations identify, remediate, monitor, exploit and manage enterprise risks in addition to coordinating the utilization of people, process and technology to improve GRC effectiveness and help manage costs.

Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (GRC) are three facets that help assuring that an organization meets its objectives. Governance is the combination of processes established and executed by the directors (or the board of directors) that are reflected in the organization's structure and how it is managed and led toward achieving goals. Risk management is predicting and managing risks that could hinder the organization to achieve its objectives. Compliance refers to adhering with the company's policies, procedures, laws and regulations.

GRC is a discipline that aims to synchronize information and activity across governance, risk management and compliance in order to operate more efficiently, enable effective information sharing, more effectively report activities and avoid wasteful overlaps. Although interpreted differently in various organizations, GRC typically encompasses activities such as corporate governance, enterprise risk management (ERM) and corporate compliance with applicable laws and regulations.

Organizations reach a size where coordinated control over GRC activities is required to operate effectively. Each of these three disciplines creates information of value to the other two, and all three impact the same technologies, people, processes and information.

Substantial duplication of tasks evolves when governance, risk management and compliance are managed independently. Overlapping and duplicated GRC activities negatively impact both operational costs and GRC matrices. For example, each internal service might be audited and assessed by multiple groups on an annual basis, creating enormous cost and disconnected results. A disconnected GRC approach will also prevent an organization from providing real-time GRC executive reports. Like a badly planned transport system, every individual route will operate, but the network will lack the qualities that allow them to work together effectively.

If not integrated, if tackled in a traditional "silo" approach, most organizations must sustain unmanageable numbers of GRC-related requirements due to changes in technology, increasing data storage, market globalization and increased regulation.

Governance describes the overall management approach through which senior executives direct and control the entire organization, using a combination of management information and hierarchical management control structures. Governance activities ensure that critical management information reaching the executive team is sufficiently complete, accurate and timely to enable appropriate management decision making, and provide the control mechanisms to ensure that strategies, directions and instructions from management are carried out systematically and effectively. Governance of risk management is the attention given to preventing excessive risk management by keeping in mind the organisation's appetite for risk. Sufficient countermeasures are required rather than excessive, unnecessary and pointless measures. The risk of risk management is that the good intentions become wasteful expenditure or impediments to growth, innovation and opportunity. Risk management is the set of processes through which management identifies, analyzes, and, where necessary, responds appropriately to risks that might adversely affect realization of the organization's business objectives. The response to risks typically depends on their perceived gravity, and involves controlling, avoiding, accepting or transferring them to a third party. Whereas organizations routinely manage a wide range of risks (e.g. technological risks, commercial/financial risks, information security risks etc.), external legal and regulatory compliance risks are arguably the key issue in GRC.

Compliance means conforming with stated requirements. At an organizational level, it is achieved through management processes which identify the applicable requirements (defined for example in laws, regulations, contracts, strategies and policies), assess the state of compliance, assess the risks and potential costs of non-compliance against the projected expenses to achieve compliance, and hence prioritize, fund and initiate any corrective actions deemed necessary.