Manage policy statements and policies

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.

The image depicts the approval process flow that is shown at the top of each policy record.

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 Policy and Compliance > Administration > Properties. 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.

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