Governance Risk and Compliance - Compliance Assurance: Purpose, Scope and Rationale
One of the significant challenges facing organizations today is the ability to respond effectively to the demands of regulators and standards bodies. This can represent a considerable burden for many, diverting time and resources from other strategic activities.
Ardoq's Compliance Assurance solution enables organizations to proactively manage compliance and associated risks by leveraging interconnected frameworks, policies, and risk management practices. The solution delivers value to business leaders by identifying actionable insights based on data regarding the current state of compliance within the organization. It provides straightforward, data-driven methods for monitoring compliance, managing documentation, and effectively mitigating risks.
Contents
What is the Purpose of Ardoq’s Compliance Assurance Solution?
The Compliance Assurance solution includes a flexible framework to support standard and custom compliance regimes. It offers default configurations for widely used frameworks, such as NIST or SOC2. The framework can be easily extended to accommodate specific niche or commercial frameworks (e.g., ISO 27001), allowing organizations to adapt it to their unique compliance needs.
The Compliance Assurance solution offers a comprehensive approach to addressing the complexities of compliance assurance and can function independently. Organizations can leverage this solution to evaluate the implementation and impact of compliance frameworks within their enterprise architecture. Additionally, it provides actionable insights for assessing and managing the business impact of compliance requirements.
The solution includes templates for surveys, broadcasts, reports, dashboards, and presentations to streamline compliance processes. These tools capture essential compliance data, such as information classification, confirmation of reviews, and other related activities, enabling organizations to maintain accurate records and foster informed decision-making.
Core Features of the Compliance Assurance Solution:
Compliance Monitoring
Track the status of the compliance framework, identify gaps, and proactively address challenges. The solution offers dashboards, alerts, and reports on how the organization meets the requirements.
Document Management
Simplify the storage, retrieval, and management of compliance-related documentation, facilitating audit preparation and organizational accountability.
Risk Assessment
Equip organizations with the tools to effectively identify, evaluate, and mitigate risks, aligning compliance efforts with risk management objectives.
Risk Management
Record potential losses and liabilities arising from non-compliance and implement measures to maintain risks at acceptable levels.
Framework Integration
Establish connections between compliance processes and other enterprise architecture components such as capabilities, technologies, roles, and data. This ensures a comprehensive approach to governance and compliance.
Scope
Ardoq’s Compliance assurance solution helps organizations understand how they meet compliance requirements within a given framework. If an organization wants to go further, the solution can be easily extended and combined with enterprise architecture components (e.g., applications, technologies, roles, and capabilities); however, this document does not directly address this second scenario. Ardoq enables organizations to stay agile and resilient when addressing regulatory challenges.
Ardoq's Governance Risk and Compliance Use Case methodology is framework-agnostic and supports various standards and frameworks. This allows for flexibility when implementing the frameworks unique to your organization. We provide NIST CSF 2.0 as a practical example of a common framework in the sample data.
Some of the questions addressed by Compliance Assurance:
Compliance Assurance | How do I understand how compliant we are as an organization in a given framework? |
Compliance Monitoring |
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Documentation Management
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Risk Management and Assessment |
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Introduction to Information Security Management System (ISMS)
It is essential to introduce the concept of an Information Security Management System (ISMS) to provide the foundation for governance, risk, and compliance efforts. An ISMS provides a structured framework to manage sensitive data, address risks, and ensure compliance with relevant standards and policies. The ISMS aligns with key GRC components such as risks, controls, frameworks, and policies. Typically an ISMS enables organizations to:
Identify and assess risks to their information assets.
Implement controls to mitigate risks.
Ensure continuous improvement of compliance practices.
This document integrates ISMS concepts into compliance assurance. It demonstrates how Ardoq’s solution supports organizations in establishing and managing their ISMS through the key components associated with the Ardoq Compliance Assurance solution.
Rationale
Ardoq has developed this solution with the compliance framework Requirement as the context focus. Focusing on the Requirement allows organizations to create and understand relationships, measure the effectiveness of internal control libraries, and understand how controls address risk. This approach is consistent with most Compliance Assurance solutions and easily extends into Ardoq’s Application Risk Management use case.
Key Components of Compliance Assurance
The Compliance Assurance solution leverages interconnected components across key workspaces—Frameworks and Policies, Risks, and Controls Workspaces. These components work together to facilitate robust compliance management. For more information regarding the Compliance Assurance Solution Metamodel, see the Compliance Assurance Metamodel Article.
Where to Use It?
The Compliance Assurance solution enables Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), Compliance Officers, and Enterprise Architects to import requirements from a relevant standard or framework. It then allows these business partners to create or map to existing internal controls, which can then be deployed to mitigate risks in the risk register.
Risk Register (Risks Workspace)
The Risk Workspace is a central repository for all identified risks and could be described as a risk registry. Each Risk Component represents a circumstance or event that could negatively impact the organization.
Risk
Risks represent a potential circumstance or event that adversely impacts or threatens continued business operations. Risk also needs to consider the likelihood of the potential circumstance or event occurring.
The Risks workspace and related components enable organizations to:
Categorize risks based on business impact (e.g., operational, strategic, or financial risks).
Assign ownership to ensure accountability and timely updates.
Calculate risk exposure using parameters like likelihood and impact.
Track changes to risks over time, ensuring alignment with the organization’s evolving priorities.
Risks are linked to controls and target components using the following reference types:
Impacts: Connect risks to the target components.
Mitigates: Identify controls that address specific risks.
The workspace of risks constitutes a risk register. Ardoq recommends that the relevant risk owners regularly review, maintain, and update the register.
Control Component Type (Controls Workspace)
The Control Workspace contains all controls implemented to mitigate risks and ensure compliance with policies or frameworks. Each Control component captures detailed information about the control’s purpose and implementation status.
Control
In Ardoq, controls are a set of methods that mitigate one or more risks. When a control mitigates a given risk, it reduces the overall level of risk associated with that risk’s threat.
Organizations can:
Define controls that address specific risks, such as technical measures (e.g., encryption) or organizational measures (e.g., training programs).
Establish linkages between controls and associated risks using the Mitigates reference type.
Ensure clarity by specifying how each control is implemented (e.g., policies, technologies, or processes).
Monitor the effectiveness of controls in reducing risk exposure and achieving compliance objectives.
The Controls workspace includes structured fields to:
Track control deployment across systems and applications.
Record compliance status and identify gaps in control coverage.
Requirement Component Type (Frameworks Workspace)
Frameworks, such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework [4], and internal organizational Policies are represented in the same way as Information Artifacts that may be broken down into a more detailed collection of Requirements. The requirements may be linked directly to Controls, indicating which controls are realizations of the requirements of adopted frameworks that corporate policies or internal controls can address.
Individual framework workspaces represent standards and frameworks that guide compliance efforts. Each Requirement component details specific requirements derived from frameworks (e.g., ISO 27001, NIST Cybersecurity Framework).
The Frameworks Workspace is composed of 3 component types:
Requirement Category - The Category component type is used to organize in a categorized hierarchy according to the framework (NIST, SOC2, ISO27001, etc.). This may be of arbitrary depth, with the leaf nodes being the component type organized in the hierarchy.
Information Artifact - In this context, the Information Artefact component type represents different security frameworks (ex. SOC2, ISO27001, CCM, NIST, etc). The Information Artefact in the context of a policy represents a policy you have within your organization.
Requirement - In this context, the Requirement component type represents the specific requirements from the framework (ex. EU DORA a requirement of A.5.1.1 - Policies for information security)
Key fields include:
ISMS Applicability Field: This field captures whether a requirement is relevant to the organization’s ISMS, ensuring alignment with security objectives.
Justification Field: Documents the rationale for including or excluding a requirement, aiding decision-making and audit preparation.
Is Implemented Field: Tracks whether the requirement has been addressed through specific controls or other measures.
Requirements are linked to risks and controls using references such as:
Realized By: Connects requirements to the controls that fulfill them.
Mitigates: Links controls to the risks they address.
Impacts: Indicates which applications or systems are affected by the requirements.
Each Framework should be modeled in it’s own workspace. These workspaces can often reference each other but, depending on how you have implemented frameworks, controls, and policies within your organization, primarily have a direct relationship to an internal control library.
End-to-End Integration
These component types and reference types create a comprehensive compliance management framework. Organizations can confidently manage their compliance posture by capturing ISMS-specific details, tracking risk and control status, and mapping requirements to compliance measures. The Compliance Assurance solution ensures traceability, accountability, and alignment across all governance, risk, and compliance aspects.