Global Risk and Compliance: A Strategy
Today, we will evaluate successful global risk and compliance strategies. We will focus on a “DevOps” approach to risk management and the development of a risk scrum team that connects through an integrated risk management platform to continuously monitor and prioritize risk and mitigation. Are you scratching your head? Read on. It’s simple!
Global Program: Global Process: Global Culture
Every element within an organization has risk. These can manifest in different forms, be it setbacks in the global supply chain, or employees departing the company with little or no warning, not to mention ever-present, constant attacks from cyber criminals. All these contribute to the risk contextual score of your organization. Remember,an organization will never rid itself from risk, but it can effectively manage risk, once identified.
Traditionally, organizations have taken different paths in dealing with risk. Many companies start with their regulatory compliance requirements. This can easily lead to overspending and stretching of resources. We always recommend to start with risk. Once you know your risk, you know which controls you need and you can reduce the burden of control requirements. No risk, no control needed…
The most successful companies recognize these truths: Risk Management is a process because risk is not point in time and Compliance is reactive to risk, not a simple ‘check the box’ function.
Managing these processes effectively requires the integration of governance risk and compliance (GRC). As above, compliance is a checklist, but risk will tell you where you have gaps, weaknesses, and opportunities. So, you should always start with risk.
Support is Critical
There are three other well-known reasons why risk management fails: agency risk, shifts or changes in the threat landscape and inherently in the form of risk and incremental failure.
Most mid-to-large size organizations have designated risk officers and internal audit teams, however, with the continuous challenges in both the regulatory and cyber threats, these teams are mostly unfunded and lack the necessary manpower to address risk and issues.
We often hear the phrase “drinking from the fire hose” from our customers…
Develop a Framework
If Executive managers and the boards of directors ultimately need to decide which element of risk is impactful to the organization, then the decision to decide which risk is more important than others weighs heavily on security teams to develop a framework that enables the decision-making process – a process that is agile to enable evaluation of these decisions on an ongoing basis.
Similar to the migration for application development moving the traditional top down waterfall method for product creation, organizations are beginning to adopt an agile method of risk management focusing on several DEVOPs movement principles including the creation of a risk scrum team.
Adoption of a risk
scrum culture
Under traditional risk management structure, the head of risk management is the designated leader of the team of limited resources with several dotted line reporting structures. Following the lead from the DEVOPS structure, organizations now are creating risk scrum teams to share the risk management responsibility across a broader set of team members.
With the enablement of a risk scrum strategy; the overall global risk and compliance requirements become part of the application development sprints within the agile model. By adding sprints into the development cycle, each work stream now has an element of risk mitigation, validation, and alignment. To insert risk in agile project management, a cycle of four processes are majorly adopted. These four risk control steps involved in agile project management are identification, assess, responses and analyze.
Within the risk scrum work streams, travelers within the corporate risk management teams can be added as resources within the various sprints to ensure their level of expertise could be placed at the correct reflection point of the product life cycle. The risk management travelers could be sent into multiple parallel sprints. Members of the DevOps teams also become contributors to the overall risk strategy by incorporating industry and corporate frameworks supporting the GRC model. Scrum leaders working with the application development leaders help contribute where within the agile model to add in the GRC sprint components.
C1Risk as part of your Risk Scrum
C1Risk is designed to be the risk scrum tool to bring risk management into a risk operation function. To build a strong GRC program for any company, you must know:
Which assets are you trying to protect?
What are you protecting against?
Why must we protect the asset?
What are the right safeguards?
Who is protecting them?
When they’re protected?
The C1Risk Platform provides an easy to use and highly configurable framework to manage risk for your systems, products, customers, supply chain and business processes, all in a single platform.
The role of Risk Management in organizations with a DevOps culture.
Under traditional risk management structure, the head of risk management is the designated leader of the team of limited resources with several dotted line reporting structures. Following the lead from the DEVOPS structure, organizations now are creating risk scrum teams to share the risk management responsibility across a broader set of team members.
With the enablement of a risk scrum strategy; the overall global risk and compliance requirements become part of the application development sprints within the agile model. By adding sprints into the development cycle, each work stream now has an element of risk mitigation, validation, and alignment. To insert risk in agile project management, a cycle of four processes are majorly adopted. These four risk control steps involved in agile project management are identification, assess, responses and analyze.
Under the waterfall structure, any changes to the application would require a possible recertification process injected into the development life cycle, causing delays and adding additional costs to the product creation. Within the risk scrum work streams, travelers within the corporate risk management teams can be added as resources within the various sprints to ensure their level of expertise could be placed at the correct reflection point of the product life cycle. The risk management travelers could be sent into multiple parallel sprints. Members of the DevOps teams also become contributors to the overall risk strategy by incorporating industry and corporate frameworks supporting the GRC model. Scrum leaders working with the application development leaders help contribute where within the agile model to add in the GRC sprint components.
Benefits of a Risk Scrum Culture
Leveraging DevOps for risk management delivers several benefits include the following:
Fewer silos and increased communications between IT and risk management groups for better governance while incorporating a preventive risk culture.
Faster time to market for business along with greater adoption of risk management frameworks and compliance mandates for regulatory compliance.
Rapid improvement based on feedback between the developers and risk management personnel within the same scrum team for better risk operation enablement.
Greater work stream assurances by enabling risk management consoles within every sprint’s KPI and risk metrics reporting.
Why is C1Risk the Solution for enabling a risk scrum strategy?
C1Risk is a GRC Platform that provides a SaaS platform for corporate policy, risk, and compliance programs. It is designed to be the risk scrum tool to bring risk management into a risk operation function.
To build a strong GRC program for any company, you must know:
Which assets are you trying to protect?
What are you protecting against?
Why must we protect the asset?
What are the right safeguards?
Who is protecting them?
When they’re protected?
The C1Risk Platform provides an easy to use and highly configurable framework to manage risk for your systems, products, customers, supply chain and business processes, all in a single platform.
It is an easy to use SaaS application to help manage the entire Risk Management Scrum flow.