GRC Analyst Guide - Governance Risk & Compliance

Governance aligns stakeholder needs with value by implementing policies and practices, defining roles for the board, senior management, and business units, and setting tone for ethics, accountability, and risk management.

Establish governance through policies, standards, and procedures that safeguard confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Examine information security policies and examples like risk management, access control, and incident response and reporting.

Explore how mandatory external standards govern information security risk, quality management, IT service management, and data privacy, with documented procedures for safety, incident response, data backup, and inventory control.

Governance establishes clear oversight through strong policies, ensures compliance with standards, laws, and regulations, and enables risk, financial, and human resources planning with accountable resource allocation.

Assess governance by evaluating four areas—structure effectiveness, board supervision adequacy, management effectiveness, and adequacy of control functions—covering ethics policy, code of employee conduct, board charters, committees, and audits.

Explain how information security and cybersecurity relate, and how governance of data through policies and regulations secures data across physical, digital, and cloud storage.

Understand the four key elements of the cyber world: devices, network, systems, and information. Learn how cyber security protects these elements from digital attacks.

Explore the relationship between information security and cyber security, and how digital and physical data protections safeguard confidentiality, integrity, and availability against threats like hacking, malware, phishing, and ransomware.

Explore the CIA triad—confidentiality, integrity, and availability—and learn how encryption, access controls, versioning, digital signatures, and backups align with ISO 27001 and GDPR.

Governance sets the tone and direction, with board and senior management enforcing policies and procedures to protect data and information across physical and cyber environments from threats through information security.

Analyze cybersecurity frameworks like NIST CSF, ISO 27001, CIS controls, SoC, GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and COSO to manage risk and ensure regulatory compliance.

Explore the NIST cybersecurity framework—identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover—and how asset management, access control, encryption, and security awareness training support risk reduction and incident recovery.

Explore ISO 27,001, the information security management systems framework that defines seven focus areas to manage information security risk, with 93 controls across organizational, people, technological, and physical controls.

Explore the CIS controls, a set of practices organized into basic, foundational, and organizational groups that strengthen an organization’s cyber security posture, including asset inventories, secure configurations, monitoring, and governance.

learn how internal controls are policies and procedures that provide reasonable assurance that an IT environment operates as intended, mitigates risk, and ensures compliance.

Analyze information security scope and controls across industries, emphasizing identity and access management, data integrity, network and endpoint security, incident response, and risk and vendor management.

Master identity and access management policies, technologies, and processes for controlling user identities and access across systems and data. Enforce password standards, grant and revoke access, and regularly review accounts.

Guard data integrity through retention and disposal procedures and data management policy, encryption, and access controls, while verifying input, processing accuracy, and backups with recovery plans.

Master network management by linking devices—cables, switches, routers, gateways, and wireless access points—while enforcing policy-based access, encryption, and regular vulnerability assessments, penetration testing, and firewall testing.

Protect endpoints by implementing an endpoint detection and response solution, antivirus and anti-malware software, and patching across operating systems and endpoint software, with configured firewalls and incident reviews and resolutions.

Evaluate firewall and intrusion detection to protect networks from unauthorized access and cyber attacks, align configurations with security policies, document and review rules, cleanup, and monitor alerts for suspicious activity.

Explore how a structured software development life cycle ensures quality, security, and compliance through requirements, design, secure coding, testing, deployment, and ongoing monitoring.

Assess and strengthen asset management by ensuring accurate identification, tracking, protection, and efficient use of assets, with categorization by type, criticality, and ownership, plus access and physical security controls.

Understand change management practices that document policies, require formal change orders and requests, and verify testing, approvals, and user acceptance before production.

Plan, test, and deploy patches across operating systems and technology components to keep systems secure and efficient, with documented testing procedures, timely application by criticality, and thorough deployment records.

Learn how vulnerability assessment identifies security weaknesses and known vulnerabilities, assigns severity, and guides mitigation or remediation across networks, hosts, wireless, applications, and databases.

Learn incident management within IT service management to identify, log, track, and resolve unplanned events that disrupt services. Prioritize, assign, notify, verify resolution, and close incidents while documenting lessons learned.

Explore how a business continuity plan defines critical processes, guides crisis response, and supports testing, disaster recovery plans, data backups, and business impact analyses to keep services available.

Develop and maintain an organization-wide framework for creating, implementing, maintaining, reviewing, communicating, and enforcing policies to govern operations and compliance, reflecting current laws, regulations, industry standards, and contractual obligations.

Explore how governance directs the organization through its board, senior management, and business units, enforcing policies and protecting data as information with cyber and information security controls.

Learn risk management by identifying, assessing, mitigating, and managing assets, vulnerabilities, threats, and threat actors, and applying likelihood, impact, and risk assessment to determine risk levels.

Identify vulnerabilities arising from coding errors, design flaws, misconfigurations, weak passwords, phishing, zero day exploits, physical access, and supply chain risks. Apply regular updates, access controls, encryption, and audits.

Identify assets, threats, and vulnerabilities to assess and mitigate IT risks. Document risks in a risk register, monitor controls, and report findings to stakeholders via dashboards or presentations.

Assess risks by identifying, analyzing, and prioritizing threats and vulnerabilities to inform mitigation decisions, evaluating likelihood and impact, using methods like historical data, audits, stakeholder brainstorming, and risk management tools.

Qualitative risk assessments use scenarios and stakeholder feedback to determine risk levels, rating likelihood from rare to frequent and impact from insignificant to catastrophic on a 1-to-5 scale.

Use a risk matrix to visualize likelihood and impact, assigning a low, medium, or high risk level, with descriptions from rare to frequent and insignificant to catastrophic.

Master quantitative risk assessment by determining asset value, exposure factor, and single loss expectancy, then multiply by annualized rate of occurrence to obtain the annualized loss expectancy.

Explore four risk response strategies—acceptance, mitigation, transfer, and avoidance—and learn how to balance budget, time, and resources with risk appetite and tolerance to reduce impact.

Monitor changes in the risk landscape to adjust risk management strategies promptly. Track risk events and controls, and implement incident response while adhering to regulatory requirements.

Communicate risk findings and status to stakeholders and decision makers to enable informed decisions and transparency aligned with organizational goals. Maintain documentation of monitoring activities, assessments, actions, and recommendations.

Learn to assess and monitor third-party risk across cybersecurity, data privacy, financial, operational, compliance, and reputational factors; use questionnaires, audits, and continuous monitoring to manage residual risk.

Understand compliance by adhering to laws, regulations, standards, policies, and guidelines, and build programs with monitoring, controls, audits, and corrective actions, referencing HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOX, and SoC.

Explore the privacy framework for protected health information and the three safeguard categories—administrative, physical, and technical—covering risk assessment, encryption tools, and audit controls.

Learn how the PCI DSS framework secures cardholder data by building a secure network, encrypting data, managing vulnerabilities, enforcing strong access controls, monitoring networks, and maintaining an information security policy.

explain the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and how sections 302 and 404 assign CEO and CFO attestations and management's internal control duties to ensure a controlled IT environment for financial reporting.

Learn how the Sox act applies to publicly traded companies in the United States, those registered with the SEC, foreign firms, and the annual audits required.

Discover how service organization controls (SoC) audits provide independent evaluation of a service organization's internal controls, delivering a SoC report that offers assurance on data security, access, and transaction integrity.

Explain the three SoC categories: SoC one, SoC two, and SoC three, plus type one and type two audits, detailing internal controls, testing, and NDA/public sharing considerations.

Explore IT audit by examining information technology and its broad range of technologies, focusing on the examination and evaluation of an organization's systems, data, processes, procedures, policies, and operations.

Identify the most common IT audits, including financial statement audits, internal audits, cybersecurity, and attestation engagements, and their projects like income statement, balance sheet, Sox, and SoC audits.

Differentiate internal auditors, who are company employees conducting year-round audits and reporting to management, from external auditors, who work for a shareholders-appointed firm and audit annually for investors and lenders.

Explore how the IT audit process applies uniformly across financial statement, internal, cybersecurity, and attestation engagement projects, with planning, fieldwork, reporting, and follow-up phases.

During the fieldwork phase, auditors gather evidence, schedule meetings, perform walkthroughs, test the design and effectiveness of controls, and communicate observations through status meetings while sampling up to 25 transactions.

The reporting phase presents audit results in a written report, starting with a draft to the immediate manager, then an exit meeting or exit memo before distribution to executive management.

In the follow-up phase, verify corrective actions after the audit report by confirming implementation, evidence from the client, updated procedures, and retested processes to close deficiencies.

Advance as a GRC professional by exploring IT audit, cybersecurity frameworks, and Excel skills, including SOX audits, SoC reviews, and Udemy courses.

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