Automating your governance, risk and compliance (GRC) process comes with the additional benefit of being able to automate activities using a ticketing system process. While many GRC tools have ticketing systems, understanding the integration of plans across the entire enterprise can help you decide whether you want to use the built-in system or invest in something that plays well with other corporate initiatives.
What Is a SOC Ticketing System?
The Security Operations Center (SOC) team monitors the issues that either tools or humans may report. To assure that a problem is handled correctly, a case — a “ticket” — must be generated, assigned, and tracked until it is closed. The necessary equipment, authorization, and interaction with incident response and case management systems should support this activity.
For central administration and reporting of support tickets, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), vulnerability management, and other SOC solutions and certifications should allow built-in local case management or link with your current IT ticketing system. In addition, you should develop new ticket categories with the help desk staff with relevant fields and attributes for security incidents.
An IT ticketing system, usually referred to as IT ticketing software, is computer software that helps businesses to manage and streamline their internal IT support requests. The system contains discrete components, known as tickets, that give context for the problem the user is having, along with other information such as category, priority, and the like.
Tickets serve as records of a specific issue, its present state, and other related data. These tickets are sent to the IT ticketing software by an organization’s users whenever an incident interferes with their workflow. There, the tickets are sorted by organizational standards, given priority, and given to various IT staffers for attention.
After reviewing these tickets, the staffers offer suitable remedies or workarounds to address the problem. IT ticketing software assists in giving the context of the issue history and its resolution, since the software serves as a single repository for all of these tickets.
How Do Ticketing Systems Help with GRC?
Ticketing systems are automated and customizable to-do lists. Since automation helps to break information silos, having a ticketing platform that works with all the other information systems in the company keeps organizational “silos” from being created. Since many stakeholders are involved in the GRC process, sharing to-do lists across multiple areas to define roles matters. The right ticketing system can do this.
For example, suppose you are using an effective ticketing system. In that case, you can easily find helpful information such as the number of outstanding tasks, the status of all the submitted work this week, who is not overloaded, and who has more tickets than they can reasonably handle. In addition, you can locate essential tasks that are still open and assign the merely nice-to-have functions to the back burner by simply changing the status of a ticket on a web page.
Members of your team can cross-assign tasks to other members when they’re overworked or find another team member who is more of an expert on a particular job. They can assign the expert to the ticket as an interested party or may even transfer ownership altogether.
This kind of system assures high visibility. The entire team will always know the overall state of the tasks at hand: what needs doing and who should be doing it.
Ticketing systems streamline the communication about the responsibility for GRC tasks. In addition, the platform provides streamlined access to information. This overlap enhances the organization’s use of the GRC tools.
What Is the Difference Between Ticketing Systems and GRC Automation?
GRC automation focuses on creating an electronic warehouse for all your compliance information. When considering the GRC environment, automation allows for an efficient information storage, gathering solution and cybersecurity.
Questionnaires can be distributed through the IT GRC tool interface or a Web portal and collated and correlated automatically without swapping emails and spreadsheets.
Existing spreadsheets and policy documents can be ported to the automated tool. In addition, these tools will automatically collect data from IT and security systems. They automate the assessment and remediation of technical controls.
You might ask yourself, what is GRC? Well, based on data gathered from people and other systems, GRC tools reduce the time and resources devoted to identifying compliance gaps and managing remediation, improving the accuracy of assessments.
Automating the information repository and the ability to share across departments helps stakeholder communication. It does not, however, remind those stakeholders to engage in the process of putting the information together. That is the role of the ticketing process.
Traditionally, people think about ticketing in terms of IT services. So, for example, a call comes into the IT help desk, the desk does triage to determine the priority of the problem, and then the ticket moves through the various stages of getting fixed.
In the case of GRC, the ticketing process creates a workflow specifically around reviewing policies and procedures. To ensure that all stakeholders are appropriately engaged, you can use the ticketing process to tag people involved and assign them specific tasks. As the tasks are completed, the review process moves forward. If someone is not doing their job, the ticket stops moving forward. Ticketing, therefore, allows you to hold stakeholders accountable.
What Makes a Good Ticketing System Process for GRC?
The critical question for instituting a ticketing process is how to maximize efficiency. Efficiency comes from complete integration. Integration occurs when systems work well together. So when reviewing the ticketing solution’s capabilities, consider whether it will integrate cleanly with your current systems.
For example, if you think of the employees involved in your compliance environment as “customers,” the idea of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can apply to your determinations. In the same way, a company would want to integrate ticketing software and CRM; you want to consider how to incorporate ticketing software and your GRC tool.
This integration of ticketing and GRC will look very similar to the ticketing and CRM. Synchronization matters because ticketing is only practical if all your systems share data correctly. This means that you need to start with the system’s ability to synchronize with your GRC. Below is a summation of how Agile CRM describes the importance of CRM and ticketing synchronization.
Seamless Synchronization of the Systems
You have the tasks that need to be automated and the widgets you need to automate this process; now, look at how you can integrate it. Both systems need to be synced in the most seamless way possible so that if any customer raises a ticket in the design, there needs to be an alert in your CRM. It should be able to:
- Import all the contacts from the help desk in your CRM to have data under one platform.
- Sync customer data and tickets with your CRM contacts’ data for a single and better view of contacts’ data.
- Connect with sales and ticket data to ensure that the sales team can view, create and update tickets that are familiar to the team.
- Share customer data such as user profiles, customer account size, and more, or relevant data to the issue or ticket.
- Provide business insights through synced data to improve workflow efficiency and customer queries.
Assuming that the corporate stakeholders taking care of regulatory compliance are your IT department’s “customers,” the above remains true for GRC and ticketing integration. Instead of importing customer contacts, you want to import supervisory roles. Syncing that data with your tickets will give you a better sense of who engages in what review. Instead of connecting sales with ticket data, you will be connecting managers with ticket data so that they know what employee engages in what compliance role. Consolidating user data to assure that staff, managers, and senior managers know everyone’s part is similar to sharing customer user information. So whether you’re looking at CRM or GRC, the synchronization of systems through ticketing software creates an efficient solution for tracking information between systems.
5 Ticketing Systems That Can Help GRC Automation
When determining whether a ticketing system is the best fit for your organization, some critical factors might be user reviews such as Capterra, how the system integrates with your configuration management database, integration with your directory service, easy-to-use API, and integration with your chosen or existing GRC tool.
Five ticketing systems that appear to meet many of the above requirements are below.
JIRA
One of the leading ticketing software companies, JIRA provides more than just bug and issue tracking. Its agile reporting allows teams to have out-of-the-box reports. With more than 1,000 plug-and-play add-ons and rich APIs, JIRA includes everything you need to be up and running with an easy-to-integrate ticketing system. In addition, JIRA’s flexibility allows you to incorporate it across several different areas, making it an excellent one-stop shopping experience.
Freshdesk
Freshdesk provides several easy-to-use apps that are tied to GoogleApps. For companies that incorporate the Google environment, this is a great product. In addition, Freshdesk allows custom requirements through its RESTful API, allowing easy creation of triggers specific to the organization. This can help ease the integration of GRC tools with the ticketing system.
UserVoice
UserVoice focuses on communication with users. Initially, for customer communication for software updates, this software traditionally organizes product feedback in beta phases. UserVoice works as a tool for data-driven product decisions. It provides direct channels between stakeholders within and outside the organization. If you can configure it for your GRC tool, it can be a powerful asset.
ManageEngine
ManageEngine offers the option to define roles with selective privileges, and gives an organization the ability to delegate users to these roles. This makes defining roles within the GRC environment easier for those trying to assign responsibilities. Most importantly, one of the roles you can grant is that of “auditor.” When looking at the ways that GRC automation allows for smoother audits, this role privilege adds value by streamlining the process.
Zendesk
Zendesk offers many advantages in terms of customization. The essential apps incorporate powerful add-ons. One of those add-ons within the customer support field would be workflow on tickets. Although traditionally used for business-to-customer help, Zendesk also integrates JSON-based and REST APIs that break out of the boundaries of the traditional product to build integrations that can leverage tickets, users, organizations, knowledge base, and more, allowing it to be a powerful partner for a GRC tool.
Manage Compliance with ZenGRC
The ZenGRC compliance workflow management system is an intuitive, simple-to-use platform that spots high-risk areas before they become issues.
A single dashboard that displays your control efficacy in real-time is one of ZenGRC’s workflow management features that simplify compliance paperwork. Recording and correcting activities also help to develop an audit trail by supporting your responses to auditor inquiries.
By delivering the necessary documentation and accelerating internal and external stakeholder contacts, ZenGRC’s single source of information platform may reduce the need for follow-up requests from external auditors.
Schedule a demo to learn how to scale your GRC program.