The Anecdotes Data Infrastructure

Better GRC for better decision making

GRC leaders play a critical role in the organization. Risk and compliance are at the core of every business process, whether expanding into new markets, products, partnerships, M&As, and anything else really. Management depends on risk and compliance – and their accompanying reports – for critical decision-making, and this central role is certainly noted in most boardrooms. Yet, with the complexity of tech stacks growing at an unprecedented pace, coupled with evolving regulations and requirements, the role of GRC teams is also becoming more challenging every day. In order to overcome these challenges, many teams have turned to automation. However, they quickly learned that automation alone, without the accompaniment of proper data-based evidence, poses its own fair share of challenges. The Anecdotes Data Infrastructure helps teams overcome these challenges and take their GRC programs to the next level.

The Challenge of Legacy GRC Tools

Many teams have onboarded legacy GRC tools to help them automate some of their workflow practices. Using these tools, tasks such as risk assessment reminders, alerts, and notifications can be streamlined to increase efficiency and reduce process redundancies. And while teams have certainly benefited from these tools, they do not provide an adequate solution to one of the most time-consuming and critical tasks faced by GRC teams – evidence collection. That’s because legacy GRC tools:

Require manual work

In many organizations, stakeholders are the ones who provide the actual evidence; sometimes resubmitting data multiple times before it meets the relevant requirements. When static evidence must be collected manually, it drains valuable resources from GRC functions and across the entire organization.

Offer limited point-in-time visibility

Screenshots, spreadsheets, and PDFs provided by the stakeholders are, at best, accurate for the moment they were taken. When used as the basis for reports sent to the Risk & Compliance Committee, CISO/CIO, GRC department, and other stakeholders, this limitation can negatively impact decision-making throughout the organization and compromise the overall processes.

Bottom line: The only way for GRC teams to overcome the growing challenges of their roles, and to make the most of their legacy tools is with a continuous stream of automatically-collected data.

Data as the Key to Credible GRC

To ensure the integrity of the reports and information GRC teams provide to the organization and to do so in a way that does not increase their workload, there is a need to fuel their existing GRC tools with standardized and credible data that is automatically collected.

What exactly is GRC data?

To build a strong GRC program, teams cannot rely on point-in-time static evidence; there is a need for dynamic data that can provide visibility into levels of compliance and risk at any given time. In order to truly increase efficiency, the same data needs to be applicable to multiple GRC use cases, something that raw data from a single source cannot do. Simply put, GRC data needs to be credible and actionable in order to have a real impact on the way GRC teams work today.

As a first step toward the end-goal of providing teams with data that can form the foundation of any GRC programs, Anecdotes recognized the need for a new, widely accepted data standard for the security Compliance ecosystem. The Anecdotes Security Compliance Data Standard is based on three main pillars: 

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1. Consistency

What data artifacts are needed to transform the entire security compliance ecosystem to one that relies on data?

Based on the collective decades of experience and the expertise of the industry leaders, Anecdotes has built a proprietary register of required data artifacts from each source (Dev tools, ticketing systems, and cloud infrastructures). The Anecdotes Data Standard creates clarity and confidence in what teams need to satisfy requirements across their compliance program.

2. Clarity

How should the data be presented so that it is both clear and actionable?

Knowing exactly what data is needed is not enough. Neither is having the raw data. For the data to be actionable, it needs to be presented in a user-friendly way while maintaining its integrity and flexibility. The Anecdotes data standard defines a simple and intuitive table structure for the data. Not only does this view provide a clear understanding of the data, the live table allows organizations to segment, scope, filter, and analyze the data to personalize it further in order to meet business objectives.

3. Credibility

Which data artifacts must be included for them to be credible?

The Anecdotes Data Standard is based on the idea that credibility stemming from irrefutable integrity is necessary. To ensure that all of the standardized data continues to be trusted by the entire ecosystem, it must be immutable and traceable. The Anecdotes Data Standard defines strict safeguards and processes that need to be implemented for the data to meet these requirements, all of which are followed by The Anecdotes Data Infrastructure.

<span class="blue-box-span"> This standardized GRC data is designed to be used in any and all relevant use cases. For example, organizations can use the same user list and configuration that was collected to ensure that multifactor authentication is in place to perform user access reviews; Data artifacts that show how the backups used in production across multiple environments are encrypted can also be mapped to set the impact level of the "data loss risk entity" in a risk register. The examples are endless, just like the possibilities. </span>

GRC data for your existing tools

Legacy GRC tools require that you input information in order to enjoy their workflow automation. Now you have a choice: do you want to manually input the same static evidence you’ve been using until now, or do you want to automatically fuel your tool with standardized and actionable GRC data?

The Anecdotes Data Infrastructure ingests the relevant data from your organizational tools and environments and turns it into GRC-ready datasets that can be used in any of your existing GRC tools.

How does it work?

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Step 1

Ingesting the Data You Need

To build a data foundation for your GRC program, you need the raw data from all of your tools and environments, including multi-cloud environments and on-prem. The Anecdotes Data Infrastructure integrates with all of these, and automatically ingests the relevant data. 

Step 2

Contextualize Your Data

Once the data is standardized, you have the foundation to deploy a GRC program that works for you. You can segment, scope, and filter the data to control what is relevant for each use case. You can configure rules, set alerts, and trigger flows to make your data actionable.

Step 3

Creating Standardized Compliance Data Sets

The ingested data is automatically turned into GRC-ready datasets, all the while preserving its integrity and credibility by providing each set with bulletproof IPE. The data is standardized to meet The Anecdotes Security Compliance Data Standard.

Step 4

Use Your Data Where and How You Want

Now that you have standardized data that is right for your program, you have the power to meet your current and future GRC needs. Whether for risk management, control monitoring, report generation, or a centralized evidence repository, you can use your data in any of your GRC tools.

Data Delegation: Govern Your Data

When collecting sensitive data, your organization's policies regarding how and where it should be stored must be at the forefront. The Anecdotes Data Infrastructure supports the hybrid option, allowing you to use it solely as a processing engine and store all data and sensitive information within your own cloud perimeter. You decide how and where your data is governed.

Bottom line: No matter which GRC tool you use today, now you can work more efficiently with automatically-collected, standardized data.

Key Benefits

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