Our latest ZenGRC product release continues to deliver improvements designed to simplify the management of your compliance program. New capabilities now available in v2.4 include:
Audit Dashboard
Running audits requires a lot of work. Due to a large amount of evidence and correspondence, audits are difficult to project manage and even more difficult to report on.
We are pleased to announce our new Audit Dashboard that addresses these hardships. Our goal with this dashboard is to enable a compliance team the ability to project manage and report on an audit. It fulfills 3 main functions:
- Visibility into Audit Posture: How effective are my controls testing?
- Visibility into Audit Progress: How close am I to completing assigned objects?
- Project Management capability, based on #2 – Audit Progress
The new Audit Dashboard allows you to view and manage just a single Audit, or all of your Audits at once. Status graphs are also included to illustrate the percentage of your controls that have been tested to be Effective vs. Ineffective, or Open (not yet tested), as well as help you view and project manage the 3 assignable Audit objects: Requests, Assessments, and Issues.
Requests
The Request object is used to collect evidence. You can easily import a DRL (Document Request List) and use the Request object to collect evidence. The Request object status bars allow you to click and quickly see which evidence requests are in-progress vs. finished (and waiting for verification) vs. overdue.
Assessments
The Assessment object is used to test and conclude upon the effectiveness of controls. You can use the assessment object in lieu of bulky workpaper spreadsheets. Just like Requests, Assessments can be assigned and project managed using the status bars corresponding to their state.
Issues
Issues are also known as gaps or findings within an audit. We’ve added new states to the Issue object to help you better track remediation, as well as added a reminder button on the assessments tab to help you keep track when there is an ineffective assessment without a mapped issue.
Controls Tab
The new Audit dashboard also includes a table of objects for Controls. In the controls tab, you can quickly toggle through to filter the list of controls for Effective vs. Ineffective vs. Open. This allows you to deep dive into the things affecting the effectiveness of a control. If control is overall ineffective, you can quickly click on the issue that was created as a result of the control failing and take action to either delegate the issue or project manage its remediation.
Shareable Permalinks
To make the Audit dashboard as useful and collaborative as possible, all filters are saved in the URL (link), which means that you can filter for an audit, and filter for an assignee, and copy/paste that link to your colleague so that they can see what you see.
Evidence Request Dashboard
Evidence Request assignees represent the largest portion of occasional ZenGRC users. Accordingly, we’ve created an Evidence Request dashboard that allows evidence owners to easily sort their assigned requests, without the complexity of audit objects that are irrelevant to their scope of work.
The functionality within the Evidence Request Dashboard mirrors the Audit Dashboard, but is designed specifically for evidence request assignees. Any filters also create permalinks that can be shared and favorited in your browser.
Weekly Summary Email
You can now see everything that is on your plate, summarized in 1 weekly email. Your new weekly summary is sent every Monday morning 9AM EST, assuming that there is work assigned to you. You can click the “Complete” button to be sent to your Audit dashboard filtered for requests or assessments assigned to you, or your “My Tasks” page. If there are any overdue items, clicking on the red text will send you to a filtered list of just overdue work.
Agile Workflow setup
We’ve made setting up and delegating tasks much easier with an updated workflow to support agile setup. Task groups are now optional. Additionally, objects can now be mapped directly to tasks and tasks can be stored as template tasks for later use if the chosen workflow is a recurring one.
Recurring Evidence Requests
Evidence requests sometimes recur on a frequency. We’ve added new functionality that automatically re-generates a request based on the following frequencies:
- Never
- Monthly
- Quarterly
- Semi-annually
- Annually
ZenGRC now works in Safari
ZenGRC now supports the latest release of Safari browser for Mac platforms. This compatibility will apply to future releases of ZenGRC.
For more details around the new features available in ZenGRC v2.4 you can view the release notes or please feel free to contact us with questions.
