How GRC Data Models and Common Controls Drive Compliance

In today's evolving business environment, managing Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) is complex. Companies must navigate multiple frameworks, meet various standards, manage risks, and protect assets efficiently.

A GRC data model is a powerful way of managing GRC processes in any organization. Its structured approach ensures that controls are applied effectively, risks are mitigated, and compliance is maintained across multiple frameworks.

Let’s explore what a GRC data model is and how common controls work.

What is a GRC Data Model?

A GRC data model is a structured approach that organizes, standardizes, and integrates data related to GRC activities within an organization. By bringing together various data points—such as risks, controls, and assets—this model fosters collaboration between different teams, including risk and compliance, enabling them to work together more effectively.

While there are multiple GRC data models tailored to specific organizational needs, a common feature across many of them is the focus on common controls. Common controls help ensure consistency and coherence in how governance and risk management requirements are approached.

What are Common Controls in GRC?

Common controls refer to standardized or shared processes organizations use to meet multiple regulatory requirements at once, as well as mitigate risks, and enhance operational consistency. Instead of creating separate rules or controls for every compliance framework, risk scenario, vendor, asset, or department, organizations can use common controls to address overlapping needs with standards and requirements.

* This diagram is a simplified data model. Your organization's may look different with additional areas. *

This unified approach delivers benefits that extend beyond compliance and risk management efforts, they drive operational improvements and foster alignment across an organization.

How are Common Controls Built?

Organizations can accelerate the creation of common controls by leveraging established standards and purpose-built frameworks. Information Security Frameworks such as ISO 27001, NIST CSF, and SOC 2 provide a well-defined structure for identifying common controls and managing them. By using these standards as a foundation, organizations can ensure their common controls are comprehensive, aligned with industry best practices, and capable of meeting the overlapping requirements of multiple compliance frameworks.

Purpose-built frameworks like the Secure Controls Framework (SCF) make it easy for organizations to adopt a ready-made common control framework right out of the box. SCF is a comprehensive set of controls integrating thousands of requirements from multiple standards into one cohesive system. This pre-built framework eliminates the need to start from scratch.

By adopting SCF, organizations can streamline designing and implementing controls as they are already mapped to standards like ISO 27001, NIST CSF, SOC 2, and more.

Not only does this save organizations significant time and effort, but it also reduces complexity, ensuring a smoother path to compliance. Beyond efficiency, leveraging SCF helps create consistency across teams and frameworks, making it a powerful tool for organizations navigating today’s complex regulatory environment.

What is the Value of Common Controls?

Common controls play a crucial role in simplifying and strengthening an organization’s GRC efforts. By providing a shared foundation, these controls:  

• Accelerate Implementation: Using information security frameworks like ISO 27001 as a guide or purpose-built frameworks like SCF provides a foundation for creating common controls. This reduces setup time and accelerates organizational implementation while ensuring adherence to industry best practices.

• Enhance Consistency: Pre-defined frameworks ensure that controls are standardized and meet industry benchmarks. This reduces variability and improves overall effectiveness, ensuring alignment with multiple regulatory and operational standards.

• Efficiency and Simplification: Utilizing common controls reduces repetitive tasks and simplifies complex compliance processes. Instead of creating separate rules for every framework, a single control can cover overlapping requirements from multiple frameworks, saving time and reducing the hassle of managing multiple standards.

• Cost Reduction: Unified common controls save time and resources by eliminating duplicative efforts across departments and teams, leading to substantial cost savings and optimized resource allocation.

• Communication and Collaboration: A common control framework fosters a shared understanding among stakeholders, including auditors, regulators, customers, and partners. This structure enhances collaboration and facilitates clearer communication across teams, departments, and stakeholders.

• Enhanced Risk Management: Using standardized common controls ensures a consistent approach to risk mitigation, creating a stronger and more cohesive risk management framework. This improves the identification, monitoring, and resolution of risks across the organization.

• Offer Scalability: Frameworks like SCF are mapped seamlessly with multiple frameworks, making them scalable as organizational needs grow.

Common controls provide an essential connection between all areas of a well-implemented GRC program, enabling organizations to enhance efficiency, consistency, and scalability while supporting immediate and long-term business goals. 

What are Other Components in a GRC Data Model?

GRC data models may differ depending on the specific tools, systems, or needs of organizations, but they share components that make up an interconnected GRC data model. 

Components feed into each other, establishing direct relationships that enhance overall GRC effectiveness. Here’s a closer look at these components:

1. Assets

Assets encompass anything of value to the organization, including physical assets like servers, informational assets like data, intangible assets like processes, and even human resources. In GRC, the identification, documentation, and classification are done by asset classes rather than tracking each asset individually. The management of assets in classes allows organizations to better assess vulnerabilities and prioritize risk mitigation, aligning with compliance needs more directly.

As new classes get added or existing assets change, the associated risks, and necessary controls, and other records need to be revisited so organizations can update their risk assessments and adjust accordingly. This process becomes easier and more automated. When assets change, updates to associated records flow through the system, helping teams quickly understand how these changes impact the rest of the organization, creating a dynamic cycle of asset management and risk assessment.

2. Frameworks

Frameworks inform the controls an organization needs to put in place for compliance obligations to meet a regulation that a company is trying to align with. This can include information security frameworks such as ISO 27001 and SOC 2, quality standards like ISO 9001, financial frameworks such as SOX, regulatory compliance with HIPAA, privacy like with GDPR, or any other kind of framework with requirements.

Frameworks are the foundation for developing effective controls, creating a solid "framework" for organizations to build and enhance their risk and compliance management processes. Aligning organizational objectives with industry standards, "frameworks" ensure risks get identified, controls implemented, and compliance achieved. They also define the audit criteria and the detection of nonconformities, which indicate areas where the framework requirements have not yet been fully met.

This structured approach supports governance and empowers organizations to proactively manage challenges while maintaining trust and operational integrity.

3. Risks

Risks are the potential for loss or harm to an organization's assets due to threats exploiting vulnerabilities. They are inherent to all organizations, and proper controls have to be implemented to mitigate risks.

As risks are identified and assessed, they inform the development of controls, assets, and remediation actions. Regular risk assessments provide data that can lead to the discovery of new risks or changes in existing ones, prompting revisions in asset classification and control effectiveness. This creates an ongoing loop where risk evaluation drives the organization’s maturity by enhancing control implementation, which in turn affects future risk assessments.

4. Vendors

Vendors introduce third-party risks that have to be managed to protect organizational assets and ensure compliance with requirements. Managing these potential risks includes establishing controls and policies for third-party risk assessments, contractual compliance, and performance monitoring.

A vendor’s compliance with organizational standards is often tested through vendor questionnaires. Vendor-related nonconformities lead to the implementation and design of additional controls to safeguard against vendor-associated risks.

5. Policies

Policies are put in place by an organization to outline how a company should be conducting itself internally and what standards they need to maintain, such as data handling practices. These often align with requirements as well as help protect assets. They directly support and help inform what controls are put into place to mitigate risks.

Policies should be regularly updated to respond to changes in requirements, risks, and audit findings, ensuring your GRC model remains aligned with evolving compliance and risk landscapes.

6. Audits

Audits assess an organization's adherence to requirements, controls, and policies. They act as checkpoints to ensure that the GRC model is functioning effectively by assessing whether controls are mitigating identified risks well.

Audits can be internal or external and extend to vendors an organization may be working with. Audit findings may uncover nonconformities that need to be addressed to strengthen the GRC model. By providing insights into compliance and control performance, audits support continuous improvement across all components of the GRC model.

7. Findings

Findings can occur when controls fail or when gaps are identified within processes. They are often found through audits or because of incidents that expose weaknesses in the GRC model.

Addressing findings is essential for reinforcing controls and improving policies to prevent future issues. Nonconformities need to be documented and addressed quickly to prevent them from escalating into larger issues. Organizations can drive continuous improvement and strengthen their GRC model’s resilience by systematically addressing nonconformities.

Other components that can be incorporated include Incidents, Issues, Objectives, implementations, tools, and others.

How Does the Data Model Work Together? 

In GRC, a data model structures and integrates various governance, risk, and compliance activities. Common components—such as assets, risks, controls, requirements, policies, audits, and vendor management—play a distinct role yet each interconnect to support organizational goals, enhance security, and ensure compliance in a feedback loop.

While there are many different approaches, these common components serve as a great foundation for any GRC data model. For example, frameworks set regulatory and operational standards, creating a basis for controls that manage and mitigate risks to protect assets. These controls are embedded into policies that guide practices across the organization, ensuring all stakeholders align with compliance needs.

Audits play a crucial role in evaluating controls and policies, identifying nonconformities, and pinpointing areas of risk exposure. Vendor management extends the GRC framework to third-party partners, enforcing the same standards of risk and compliance to protect the organization from external vulnerabilities.

This interconnected structure fosters control maturity, proactive risk management, continuous compliance, and operational resilience. Each component feeds back into the model, creating feedback loops that enable dynamic adjustments. Insights from audits, risk assessments, and vendor evaluations are integrated back into controls, requirements, and policies, helping the organization respond efficiently to emerging risks, regulatory changes, and new business objectives.

Through this continuous improvement process, a GRC model not only manages present risks but also builds a culture of resilience, positioning the organization to adapt effectively to future challenges.

What Are the Benefits of a GRC Data Model? 

Centralizing and integrating key risk management, compliance, and governance activities in a GRC data model supports long-term resilience, adaptability, and efficiency, ultimately driving stronger performance and organizational stability. 

Here’s how a GRC data model can add significant value to an organization:

How Do GRC Tools Help with Data Models?

A dedicated GRC tool supports establishing a GRC data model by providing a centralized platform where all core components—such as assets, risks, controls, requirements, policies, and audits—can be integrated and managed natively. They can easily automate data collection, to ensure consistency across different GRC areas, and tracking and reporting of all GRC related activities.

Through intuitive dashboards and analytics, dedicated GRC tools, such as StandardFusion, offer insights and create feedback loops that help continuously improve risk management, compliance, and governance practices. These tools drive efficiency and accuracy while enhancing overall performance by ensuring that updates to any part of the framework are quickly communicated and enforced across the organization, creating a shared language.

By using a GRC platform, organizations can easily implement common controls and a data model, resulting in avoiding redundancy, while creating a scalable structure that allows them to rapidly adapt to new standards without overhauling existing systems.

Conclusion

A robust GRC data model helps organizations simplify these efforts by centralizing controls and compliance activities. This streamlines processes, enhances visibility, and enables organizations to respond more effectively to changing risks and regulations.

By leveraging a GRC data model, your organization can operate more efficiently, remain compliant, and better manage risks—ultimately leading to a more secure and resilient enterprise. Explore how StandardFusion can help your organization centralize and automate its GRC processes.