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GRC: governance, risk and compliance as one working system

Most GRC programmes fail by becoming paperwork. We help you build one that runs on how your team already works, and we give you the ISO 27001 policy templates to start with, free.

The three parts of GRC

Governance

Who decides, and how it is recorded

Policies approved by management, named owners for every control, a management review that happens on a calendar and produces decisions. Governance is the difference between a document set and an organisation that follows it.

Risk

What could go wrong, and what is done about it

A risk method people can repeat, a register that is reviewed rather than written once, treatment decisions with an owner and a date, and risk acceptance signed by someone entitled to accept it. Our ISO 31000 work builds this.

Compliance

Proof against a framework, not a promise

ISO 27001, ISO 20000, the DPDP Act 2023 and GDPR each ask for evidence. Compliance is keeping that evidence as a by-product of normal work, so an audit is a sampling exercise and not a scramble.

What a working GRC programme contains

  • A risk register and method. One method, one scale, one owner per risk, reviewed on a schedule.
  • A policy and procedure library. Approved, versioned and mapped to the controls it supports. Start with the free ISO 27001 templates.
  • A control library mapped to frameworks. Each control written once and mapped to ISO 27001, DPDP and the customer questionnaires that keep arriving.
  • An evidence and audit calendar. What is collected, by whom, when, and where it is kept.
  • Management reporting. A short monthly page: open risks, overdue actions, incidents, exceptions.
  • Supplier and incident registers. The two registers auditors and regulators ask about first.

None of it needs a software platform to start. It needs owners, a calendar and records that are kept as the work happens. We set that up with you, using your own tools, and stay with it until the first surveillance audit or regulator question has been answered from the records.

Start free, then go deeper

Questions people ask

What is GRC in cyber security?

GRC stands for governance, risk and compliance. In cyber security it is the management side of the work: who is accountable, how risk is assessed and treated, and how the organisation shows it meets a standard such as ISO 27001 or a law such as the DPDP Act.

Do I need a GRC tool?

Not to begin. A GRC programme works in a spreadsheet and the ticketing system you already have. A platform is worth buying once the process exists and the volume of risks, controls and evidence makes manual tracking the bottleneck. Buying the tool first usually produces an empty tool.

How does GRC relate to ISO 27001?

ISO 27001 is a GRC framework for information security. Its clauses cover governance (leadership, roles, review), risk (assessment and treatment) and compliance (internal audit, evidence, improvement). Certifying to it is one way to prove a GRC programme works.

Where are the free ISO 27001 templates?

In the policy library: a full set of ISO 27001 policies and procedures, a Statement of Applicability for all 93 Annex A controls, and ISO 20000 service management documents. Each can be read in full on the site, and the PDF is free with an account.

Are the templates enough to get certified?

No template is. Certification depends on your own risk assessment, the controls you actually run and evidence that you follow your documents. The templates save the drafting time so the effort goes into your decisions.

What we are, and are not. SecureXcel is a consultancy. We do not sell a GRC software licence. The templates are drafts, not legal advice, and do not make an organisation compliant or certified on their own.