What is ServiceNow GRC

ServiceNow is a well-known IT Service Management (ITSM) platform widely used across companies to streamline IT operations and improve business performance.

ServiceNow GRC is one of ServiceNow's core products. It is a robust platform that helps organizations identify, manage, and mitigate risks and ensures compliance with regulatory standards and policies.

This article will discuss ServiceNow GRC's key features, benefits, and more in greater detail.

Table of Contents:

• What is GRC?
• What is ServiceNow GRC?
• Why is ServiceNow GRC important for businesses?
• Key features
• How does ServiceNow GRC work?
• Automation Process
• Benefits
• Frequently Asked Questions

What is GRC?

GRC deals with Governance, Risk, and Compliance. It monitors organisational change, communicates key concerns, anticipates risks, and enables quick remedial actions.

GRC assists in responding to business risks, managing policies, conducting audits, and establishing controls.

Let’s start with learning the fundamentals of GRC here.

 

• Governance:

At its basic level, governance refers to collecting rules, regulations, and procedures. 

• • Governance ensures that an organization’s operations are aligned with its business objectives. 
  • It handles resource management, responsibility, ethical behavior, and management controls.
  • Governance helps to meet consumer needs and achieve overall business goals.
  • Effective governance evaluates employee performance based on outcomes rather than obligations.
• Risk:

Organisations must identify, analyse, and manage all risks to ensure business reliability. They must devote resources to mitigating, monitoring, and controlling risks to reduce risk.

• • Business goals may be met while minimising risk 
  • Implementing the risk management program ensures seamless business operations.
• Compliance:

Compliance is about adhering to industry/government rules, standards, regulations, and legislation. Failure to do so can create unwanted issues, reputation loss, penalties, and more.

There are different types of compliances, including the following.

• • Regulatory compliance refers to a company's adherence to external rules, laws, and industry standards. 
  • Corporate or institutional compliance refers to a company's policies, regulations, and internal controls.

Explores ServiceNow GRC, its key features, benefits, and automation—boost your expertise with this ServiceNow Training.

• GRC Tools:

Let’s look at the widely used GRC tools companies use worldwide.

• • ServiceNow
  • MetricStream
  • Auditboard
  • Logicgate
  • Archer
  • IntelligenceBank GRC

Among all these GRC tools, ServiceNow GRC is one of the crucial ones. 

• Industries use ServiceNow GRC

We shall look at the industries that use the ServiceNow GRC tool.

• • Finance
  • Banking
  • Insurance
  • Healthcare
  • Cloud services
• Companies use ServiceNow GRC

Many companies leverage the ServiceNow GRC tool to manage their governance, risk, and compliance. 

Let’s look at the companies and the benefits they gained from this adoption.

• • Cognizant says that it used ServiceNow GRC to provide ESG risk dashboards to its customers.
  • DNB reports that it adopts ServiceNow GRC to take proactive measures on risk management. The company reduced risks by proactively addressing the potential risks before they severely impacted the business.
  • Hitachi Energy adopted ServiceNow GRC to gain cyber resilience against the latest threats and vulnerabilities. It helped the company to stay SOX compliant.
  • Wipro says that implementing ServiceNow GRC empowered the company to set new service standards and enter new markets boldly.
  • Equinix states that ServiceNow GRC has provided Equinix with a single source of truth to demonstrate compliance to customers.

We hope you have a technical understanding of GRC, where ServiceNow GRC is used, and why it is used. Now, it's time to explore the ServiceNow GRC.

What is ServiceNow GRC?

ServiceNow GRC is an integrated risk framework that integrates business, security, and IT aspects. This platform streamlines your organization's administration, risk, and compliance management processes. 

It includes the key elements listed below:

• Integrated risk management
• Business continuity management
• Privacy management 
• Third-party risk management

ServiceNow GRC helps you to share data and automate workflows across all functional groups. So you can develop a unified GRC program for your organisation. 

Moreover, it provides a real-time view of risk and compliance, improves decision-making, and increases productivity through continuous monitoring and automation.

Why is ServiceNow GRC important for businesses?

ServiceNow GRC is pivotal in ensuring organisations' reliability and stability, regardless of changes in external and internal scenarios.

Let’s unpack the reasons for the same in the following.

• The integrated approach of ServiceNow GRC provides organisations with efficient operational resilience.
• ServiceNow GRC is a multilayered and interdependent platform that helps organisations enhance their performance by analysing the following:
  
  • Assets
  • Controls
  • Potential risks
  • Governing policies
  • Auditing results
• It overcomes the bottlenecks in keeping up with new compliance standards
• It helps to minimise the costs associated with expanding the workforce and infrastructure. 
• It automates the GRC processes, reducing manual efforts, identifying risks in advance, and making data-driven decisions for better performance.

Overall, ServiceNow GRC ensures smooth business processes and drives increased business efficiency.

Key features of GRC:

The features of ServiceNow GRC are noteworthy. This section extensively discusses them in detail.

Let’s check it out!

1, Risk Management

Risk Management in ServiceNow GRC is a key module that focuses on discovering, analysing, and monitoring risks that may disrupt normal business activities.

Here are some of the crucial benefits of risk management.

• Risk management dynamically screens for risks and automatically initiates procedures when risks occur.
• It analyzes the risk status of the entire organization with insightful reports and dashboards.
• It includes preparing risk scoring to determine risk exposure and potential losses.
• It provides risk evaluations and enables automatic procedures in the event of threats.
• It also covers risk prioritisation and response mechanisms 

2. Policy and Compliance Management

ServiceNow GRC’s policy and compliance management helps organisations to:

• Establish a centralised platform for generating and maintaining policies.
• Automate and manage policy lifespans, company standards, and internal control processes 
• Enable procedures for continually identifying, assessing, and monitoring control operations.

3. Audit Management

ServiceNow’s GRC Audit Management automates internal auditing, replacing manual processes. It helps businesses maximise productivity while protecting their assets.

Leveraging ServiceNow GRC’s audit management system, you can:

• Plan, prioritise, and monitor audit observations across the audit product lifecycle.
• Reduce duplicate audit findings and lower risks.
• Strengthen audit assurance,  enhance evidence gathering, and allow managers to focus on critical responsibilities.
• Minimise time consumption and provide accurate audit recommendations.
• Enhance business production via resource optimisation.

4. Business Continuity Management

ServiceNow GRC helps create and maintain business continuity plans, prepare organisations for potential disruptions, and provide practices for recovering from them.

ServiceNow GRC’s operational resilience management detects, prevents, and responds to business disruptions.

Here are some more pointers about business continuity management.

• It helps assess the potential impact of events on business services, tracks actions, and thus improves efficiency.
• It minimises the likelihood of outages and security incidents and disaster recovery time.
• It includes performing business impact analysis to improve business resilience and results.
• It defines metrics and prioritises dependencies for business service risks and controls.

5. Third-Party Risk Management

ServiceNow GRC Vendor Risk Management continuously monitors, identifies, evaluates, and changes vendor system risks associated with third-party vendors.

This module includes vendor assessments and monitoring. You can eliminate or mitigate risks by managing the vendor portfolio in one place.

• Vendor Risk Management ensures subcontracted distributors have no adverse effect on business performance.
• It enables businesses to analyse suppliers, identify risks, and reduce the need for human evaluation and costs through automation.

We hope the ServiceNow GRC modules discussed in this section have given you extensive knowledge of minimizing risks and maximizing operational efficiency.

ServiceNow GRC enhances governance, risk, and compliance management—check out ServiceNow Interview Questions to deepen your understanding.

How does ServiceNow GRC work?

As you know, ServiceNow GRC is a robust platform that helps organisations to streamline governance, risk, and compliance processes. 

Let’s break down how ServiceNow GRC works in the following.

• Centralised data management

ServiceNow GRC centralises all GRC-related data in one place. It helps users get a comprehensive view of risk, compliance, policies, audits, and controls. It also ensures consistency in data access across organisations, simplifying the decision-making process.

• Automated workflows and processes

ServiceNow GRC automates risk assessments, compliance tasks, and audit tracking. Automated risk assessments help users find and prevent potential risks early.

ServiceNow GRC automated compliance activities like policy reviews, control assessments, and regulatory checks. It helps to save time and reduce human errors.

It allows organisations to track audits and follow-ups on audit findings.

• Risk identification, assessment, and mitigation

With ServiceNow GRC, organisations can identify, assess, and mitigate risks. It uses the risk matrices to classify risks based on their severity and probability.

Risk mitigation plans are developed based on the severity of risks. Automated workflows help implement remediation plans and accept risks.

• Real-time dashboards and reporting

ServiceNow GRC offers real-time dashboards and reporting tools to help organisations monitor their GRC processes.

Dashboards provide a unified view of key GRC metrics, including risk levels, audit results, compliance status, etc.

Customised reports help organisations assess their GRC posture and track performance over time.

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ServiceNow GRC Automation Process:

In this section, we will see how automation works in ServiceNow GRC. The process diagram below shows the automation implementation in ServiceNow GRC.

Let’s take a look at it!

1, Define Business Rules

You must define business rules in advance and incorporate them into your ServiceNow GRC implementation strategy.

Typical business rules that you must define include the following:

• Controls and owners of controls
• Critical vendors
• Control tests and anticipated outcomes
• Risks, consequences, and probability
• Testing frequency and control
• Surveys, questions, and documentation 
• The people who need to interact with or access the GRC system's contents

2. Manage Controls

You must periodically examine and update your procedures to keep up with business and risk profile changes.

Ask the following questions about each of your controllers as part of this process:

• How does this control contribute to the achievement of my business objectives?
• Is there any other control that I can use to safeguard my business better?
• Is this control preventing or identifying danger effectively?
• Can I implement a control to decrease process overhead, increase IT performance, and mitigate risk?

Building a unified set of controls is more effective and cost-effective. By cross-mapping controls, you may validate a common control's compliance with numerous regulatory and practice guidelines frameworks.

3. Identify Risks

Identifying risks, their effects, and their likelihood of occurrence will help your firm focus on the right things. It will also help you determine the exact business effect of a failed control. 

Risk identification can help you prioritise control testing and remedial efforts when resources are limited.

4. Automate Workflows

With your integrated solution, develop a GRC plan that enables adding GRC features between inspection cycles to minimise business impact.

Next, you must build, monitor, and optimise efficient, no-code automated workflows. These help you respond instantly to risks and compliance violations.

5. Monitor Compliance

Continuous monitoring enables you to control weaknesses as they occur and to initiate remedies quickly. It minimises both the total risk and the work necessary to maintain compliance.

In short, ServiceNow GRC automation simplifies managing GRC processes and significantly boosts productivity.

Benefits of ServiceNow GRC:

Let’s outline the benefits of ServiceNow GRC.

• Operational Efficiency: The ServiceNow GRC provides Enterprise Service Management tools that quickly deploy large systems with an extensive IT infrastructure. It saves time and costs while ensuring a seamless system setup.
• Proactive Risk Management: ServiceNow GRC performs risk assessments using profiles. With integrated risk management, you can detect and handle risks in advance, helping to avoid any negative impact on enterprises.
• Improved risk visibility: ServiceNow GRC provides enhanced visibility into an organisation's risk landscape. It also automates risk evaluations, evaluates vendor risks, and maintains a risk register.
• Centralised data: Service GRC gathers data from multiple sources and stores it in a centralised location. It helps in effectively assessing and managing risks.
• Dashboards and Reporting: ServiceNow GRC's dashboards and reports help users accurately understand organisations' risk posture. They simplify risk assessment and compliance tracking.
• Continuous Risk Monitoring:  ServiceNow GRC supports Real-time monitoring. It assists in tracking Key Risk Indicators (KRI).
• Automated Workflow: ServiceNow GRC helps organisations manage GRC tasks efficiently using automated workflows. It speeds up approvals, escalations, and reporting efficiently and in less time.
• Compliance Monitoring: The compliance manager designs internal controls and monitors compliance activities. Controls reduce hazards and help decrease risks.

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Summary:

• ServiceNow GRC is a platform that helps organisations manage risk, compliance, and audit activities.
• It enables continuous monitoring and assessment of risks and risk-based decision-making.
• It provides integrated risk management for a centralised view of risk across the enterprise.
• It automates audit planning, execution, and reporting
• It automates the policy lifecycle and streamlines compliance activities
• It helps in creating and maintaining business continuity plans and performs business impact analysis
• It enables risk management associated with third-party vendors

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Is learning ServiceNow worth it?

Ans: Popular companies like TCS, Cognizant, Accenture, HCLTech, LTIMindtree, etc., hire servicenow professionals throughout the year.

AmbitionBox says that ServiceNow developers with 2-5 years of experience can earn an average salary of over 7 LPA in India. Indeed reports that ServiceNow developers can earn an average salary of over 124k USD annually.

2. What are the industries that recruit ServiceNow professionals?

Ans: Software product development, IT services and consulting, financial, and other major industries hire ServiceNow professionals to optimise IT service management operations and delivery.

3. Is ServiceNow a cloud-based solution?

Ans: Yes, ServiceNow is a cloud-based solution. Users can access ServiceNow from anywhere, scale resources, and more.

4. Can I customize ServiceNow?

Ans: Yes, you can customize ServiceNow. You can tailor forms, workflows, notifications, and reports to meet their GRC requirements. You can also integrate ServiceNow with external tools and applications.

5. What is the workflow used in ServiceNow GRC?

Ans: ServiceNow GRC uses workflows to automate repetitive tasks like risk assessments, audit tracking, and compliance checks. Workflows ensure consistency and transparency.

Conclusion:

ServiceNow GRC provides a flexible, highly adaptable, and customizable platform. It is a suite of applications that helps organisations manage governance, risk, and compliance and boost their operational efficiency.

MindMajix offers industry-demanding ServiceNow training for beginners and experienced learners. The training will enhance your knowledge of ServiceNow GRC to new levels and transform you into a full-pledged ServiceNow professional.

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