Policy as Code Engine for Preventive compliance management

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Policy as Code Engine for Preventive compliance management

    The Policy as Code Engine (PaCE) enables ServiceNow customers to embed preventive compliance controls directly into digital workflows, ensuring that business activities adhere to regulations and IT policies before they proceed. By integrating PaCE with Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) modules, organizations can automate compliance validation, reduce risks, and improve operational efficiency in environments such as DevOps.

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    Key Features

    • Control Mapping and Integration: Compliance managers map control objectives to PaCE policies, which are linked to GRC via the Compliance Data Source Registry, enabling seamless exception handling and compliance tracking.
    • Policy Validation Before Deployment: PaCE validates custom policy code during development, preventing deployment of non-compliant changes by stopping workflows if violations are detected.
    • Embedded Compliance in Workflows: Employees receive real-time feedback on compliance status within their workflows, enabling proactive exception requests when necessary without halting processes.
    • Log and Audit Access: Control owners can review PaCE logs to monitor compliance instances, facilitating transparency and easier audit evidence collection.

    Key Outcomes

    • Reduced Training Needs: Embedding controls in workflows decreases reliance on extensive employee training, as compliance guidance is provided contextually.
    • Automated Compliance Monitoring: Continuous automated checks reduce manual review efforts and help maintain adherence to policies.
    • Improved Audit Efficiency: Automated audit logs simplify compliance audits by providing readily accessible evidence.
    • Lower Risk and Violations: Continuous policy enforcement minimizes the likelihood of non-compliant actions.
    • Enhanced Visibility and Velocity: Real-time compliance insights support business, risk, and compliance stakeholders, while allowing workflows to proceed efficiently through exception handling.

    Compliance managers can map the control objective with the Policy as Code Engine (PaCE). PaCE calls GRC passing the document reference and the PaCE policy for which exceptions need to be determined. Control owners can view the PaCE logs to understand the compliance or non-compliance instances.

    With increasing number of regulations that organizations must comply with and equally increasing technology risks, organizations are obligated to integrate preventive controls in the digital workflows. For example, when a new software application is developed during a DevOps process, there are several IT policies and controls that have to be implemented and validated to reduce technology risk.

    With Policy as Code Engine, you can write your own custom code logic to validate a policy and integrate in a deployable instance. PaCE policy validates the code even before it is committed into a deployable instance and checks for its compliance. If there is non-compliance, the deployment is stopped. To integrate with GRC, PaCE as a policy is added to a control objective using the Compliance Data Source Registry feature.

    Preventive compliance management through integration with PaCE prevents compliance team, operations team, DevOps engineers from performing non-compliant activities. On the other hand, this integration helps them to raise exceptions in advance.

    Key features of this integration are:
    • Compliance is embedded in the employee workflows to improve the overall experience of the employees.
    • Customers can codify their controls and based on the execution status, employees can be informed if their action in the workflow would determine non-compliance.
    • In case of non-compliance, based on a business requirement the employees can request an exception and continue with the digital workflow.
    Key benefits through this integration are:
    • Reduced reliance on employee training: Since the controls are embedded in the workflows, the number of trainings that employees have to go through are considerably reduced.
    • Automated reviews and compliance monitoring: Automated checks ensure that controls are not violated, thereby decreasing the task of manual reviews.
    • Automated audit logs: Audit and compliance teams can access the automated audit logs, which reduce the task of manual audits and evidence collection.
    • Lower risks and reduced violations: Continuous monitoring of controls minimizes the probability of violations.
    • Visibility: Provides real-time visibility of compliance to stakeholders such as business, risk, and compliance teams.
    • Velocity: Increases the velocity of workflows as employees can request exceptions if there is business need without impeding the completion of the workflow.