Organizations import their authority documents from Network Frontiers Unified
Compliance Framework (UCF), another third-party provider, or they create them manually. The
Policies and Procedures module contains overview and detailed information related to policy
approvals, policies, and policy statements.
Policies and Procedures Overview
The Policies and Procedures
Overview is contained in the Policies and procedures
module and provides an executive view into compliance requirements, overall compliance, and
compliance breakdowns so areas of concern can be identified quickly. Users with the Compliance
Administrator and Compliance Manager roles view the Policies and Procedures
Overview.
Table 1. Policies and Procedures Overview reports in the base system
| Name |
Visual |
Description |
| Control compliance |
Donut chart |
Displays the overall compliance of all the controls in the system. |
| Control details |
Donut chart |
Displays a breakdown of controls, grouped by owner, category, or
type. |
| Control Overview |
Column Chart |
Displays the total number of controls related to each policy. The chart is
stacked to display overall control compliance status for each policy. |
| Control Issues by Policy (Opened Date) |
Line Chart |
Displays the number of control issues opened each week, grouped by
policy. |
| Policy Exceptions |
List |
Displays a list of control issues that have been closed with a response value
of accept, meaning the issue was not remediated. |
| Total Policy Statements by Policy |
Bar graph |
Displays a count of the overall number of policy statements in each policy.
The chart is stacked to display policy statements by type. |
Policy Approval Process
Policies are part of a strict approval process to ensure compliance and to reduce exposure
to risk. Publishing a policy is automatically incorporated in the approval process.
Compliance managers set the length of time that policies are valid, ensuring that the team
reviews the policy often to affirm its validity. Policies have a type, such as a policy,
procedure, standard, plan, checklist, framework, or template.
Table 2. Policy approval states
| State |
Description |
| Draft |
All policies start in Draft state. In this stage, all
compliance users can modify the policy and policy statements. |
| Review |
The owner, owning group, and reviewers can modify the policy and policy
statements and send it on to the next state. |
| Awaiting Approval |
The policy is read only in this state. Approved policies move forward to the
Published state. Unapproved policies move back to
Review. If no approvers are identified on the policy
form, the state is skipped and published without an approval. |
| Published |
Approved policies are automatically published to a template-defined KB. Once
a policy is published, it remains in a read-only state. The Valid
to field on the policy form defines how long the policy is
valid. When a policy reaches the end of the Review
state and is Approved for publishing, it is automatically
published to the GRC knowledge base (as defined in the . The article template field on the policy
form defines the style of the published policy. |
| Retired |
The KB article is removed when a policy is put into a
Retired state. |
Policies
Compliance managers catalog and
publish internal policies that define a set of business processes, procedures, and
or standards.
Policy Statements
Compliance managers
catalog the policy statements and generate controls from those policy
statements.
Policy statements only reference a single policy, although they can cover multiple
citations from different authority documents. They can be organized into
Classification,
Category, and
Type.
Note: UCF refers to policy statements as Controls. When UCF is data
is imported, controls are imported into the policy statements table.
