In an organization, people feel overwhelmed when they are asked to comply with several mandates. However, a unified approach makes it simple and easy for every stakeholder to comply with mandates specific to the organization.
Here are some steps that facilitate better compliance:
There are some pain points that organizations typically struggle with in compliance:
An Authority Document can be a lot of different things – law, regulation, contractual obligation, safe harbor, international/national standard, audit guideline, best practices, etc. In compliance, certain regulations are mandatory to be followed. Apart from these, there are also several voluntary regulations that an organization chooses to follow or comply with.
Mandates don’t use the same terms across Authority Documents. For instance, if one document refers to the term “Shut the Faucet”, another one might say “Close the Spigot” and another one may refer to “Turn off the Nozzle”.
To prove that all these three terms mean the same thing, one would have to rely either on what’s already built in the Unified Compliance Framework (UCF) or do it manually by building a noun or a verb translator.
For example, a Personal Data Request can be a harmonized term for citations like Request Access to Personal Data, Request by a Concerned Party, or Request Information on the processing of his/her personal data. The process can be streamlined by providing common control that is a shared compliance requirement connected to the original mandates that an organization must follow.
One can cross-walk citations manually or harmonize citations through common controls. A UCF common control helps map each of the mandates in the documents back to a common control if the verbs and nouns are related, making it easy to comply with. It is an enormous library of interconnected compliance documents and the world’s only commercially available Common Controls Framework.
The UCF features:
One can access the UCF through the Common Controls Hub SaaS portal which is the only way to access the UCF data. A free starter account is available at Click here
There is also modularity in the UCF Common Control which can be customized to suit each organization’s needs. The Authority Documents are mapped and placed into a Common Controls Hub that one can access and use. By leveraging the framework, one gets access to a consolidated de-duplicated list of controls. It is quite an extensible framework and comprises almost a thousand of the most common Authority Documents.
UCF saves time. Without it, there will be twice the number of controls which require twice the effort. It is also an easy-to-use tool from which one can either export their requirements into a spreadsheet or move the content from the UCF into MetricStream through an API. This process is cost-effective as well because it helps reduce manual labor requirements.
Typically, controls are mapped to risks and processes. It is also vital that risks and controls are mapped to policies and procedures as well. If there are too many exceptions in the policy, those exceptions play an important role in how effective the control is. The Federated Data Model provides organizations with the ability to map intelligently across the landscape of the GRC processes and policies.
The Data Explorer feature gives you the ability to drill down from a control perspective to find the number of controls for a given regulation, the assessments that are done on a specific control, the issues logged out of the control assessments in a graphical representation format, and with information about the GRC library landscape.
The core components of IT Compliance in MetricStream are listed below:
All these components put together give organizations the flexibility and freedom to manage their IT Compliance program effectively, at scale
The MetricStream IT Compliance solution helps an organization realize the following benefits:
Cybersecurity as a domain is the equivalent of the first line for organizations and their data today. As a result, they are bound by several laws and regulations around how they collect, store, and use data, as well as their ability to comply with the very frameworks laid out by them as best practices for their industry.
Before implementing MetricStream’s IT Compliance solution, the cybersecurity solutions provider listed the following challenges:
Post implementing MetricStream’s IT Compliance solution, the organization reported the following outcomes:
MetricStream offers a comprehensive product suite in the areas of:
MetricStream is the world’s largest independent GRC software provider with 1,200+ employees, an Enterprise SaaS Platform, a global partner ecosystem, and an experience of 450+ Enterprise Implementations, thus consistently ranking us a leader in prominent industry analyst reports.