Policy as Code Engine for Preventive compliance management

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 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. It integrates with Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) by mapping control objectives and validating policy compliance before deployment. This prevents non-compliant activities in processes such as DevOps and allows compliance managers and control owners to monitor compliance status through PaCE logs.

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    Key Features

    • Workflow-embedded Compliance: Codify controls as executable policies that inform employees in real time if their workflow actions could cause non-compliance.
    • Exception Handling: Employees can proactively request exceptions within the workflow if non-compliance is detected, ensuring business continuity without violating policies.
    • Integration with GRC: PaCE policies are linked to control objectives through the Compliance Data Source Registry, enabling automated compliance validation and monitoring.

    Key Outcomes

    • Reduced Training Burden: Embedding controls reduces the need for extensive employee compliance training by providing real-time guidance.
    • Automated Compliance Monitoring: Controls are continuously checked automatically, minimizing manual reviews and compliance violations.
    • Audit Efficiency: Automated audit logs provide evidence and visibility to audit and compliance teams, streamlining audit processes.
    • Lower Risks and Violations: Continuous preventive controls reduce the likelihood of compliance breaches.
    • Enhanced Visibility and Workflow Velocity: Real-time compliance status is visible to business, risk, and compliance stakeholders, while workflows maintain speed by allowing exception requests without disruption.

    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.