Once you have all of the questions and question lists you need in Isora GRC, you can start to create assessments. An assessment can be thought of as a bunch of questions along with a list of organizational entities that the assessment is targeting. For each organizational unit which is affected by the assessment, at least one survey will be created. Then responsible users within the organizational unit fill out the surveys. When all surveys of an assessment have been completed and signed off appropriately, then the assessment is complete.

Assessments aren't created from the assessment module. They are created using the admin module. Only Isora GRC superusers have the ability to create assessments and publish them to users.

The following flowcharts illustrate many of the aspects of assessments and how they come together to produce surveys for the users.

Open

Figure 8-2 Org Unit Assessment Object Relationships

For app assessments, you can only choose one app to assess for a given assessment. So there is also only one survey produced, which simply consists of the questions in the question list you use when you create the assessment.

Open

Figure 8-3 App Assessment Object Relationships

Assessment Types

Assessment types are used to track the same assessment when you run it multiple times in a series. The types are driven by the needs of your organization, and often tied to governmental regulatory requirements. Each time you are going to start a new series of related assessments, you should start by creating a new assessment type.

Click “manage assessment types” to see a list of existing types, edit or remove them, or add a new one. You can also upload a simple CSV where each line has the name of an assessment type.

Assessment types have different target types, depending on what they assess. For example, if you're assessing the security of an application, the target would be "app". The "org unit" target refers to an assessment which includes OU-level questions and classification of all hosts on sheets that belong to the OU. You can rename an existing assessment type, but you can't change its target type.

Creating or Editing Assessments

To work with assessments, click the “manage assessments” link. In the table, you can see a list of existing assessments. A value of published=”yes” means that the assessment has been published to Isora GRC, and surveys are available to users. It does not indicate whether any individual surveys of the assessment have been launched.

All assessments that have ever been created will be listed here. This allows you to see both current and historical data. You can remove assessments by clicking the X next to them. You can also edit an existing assessment, or click the + button to create a new one.

The page you see when you edit an existing assessment is just like what you see when you create a new one, except it’s already filled in with existing data.

Historically, assessments would be targeted to one or more organizational units. In current versions of Isora GRC, you can create assessments that target various types of entities. Depending on the target type of an assessment, different options will be presented when you create a new assessment.

To create a new one, click the + button. This starts a 2-step process. In the first step, you assign a name, due date and assessment type. Depending on the type you choose, the following drop-down will be populated with question lists that are appropriate for the target type of the assessment. If this is a draft and you don't want anyone to actually start the assessment yet, leave the "publish on create" box unchecked.

Click “next” to proceed to the second step of the process. Depending on what type of assessment you are creating, the next step will offer different options. For example, if the target of the assessment type is "app," you type the name of the app you want to assess into the search box.

If the type of assessment you are doing includes unit-level questions, then you'll be presented with a list of organizational units, so you can choose whichever ones you want to include. Each OU chosen will result in a survey being published once the assessment is launched, and whoever has the authority within that OU will be able to answer the questions.

Continue clicking the checkboxes next to the OU names and filling out the forms for each OU, until all of the OUs that you want have been included. If you check the checkbox to “skip org units without sheets,” then any OUs that do not have any sheets of hosts will not be included in the assessment, even if you selected them. Until it has been published, you can edit the assessment later to add or remove OUs, or even change the assessment type or question list. Once published, you won’t be able to edit the assessment.

Click the “create” button to save the new assessment.

If you save an assessment without publishing it, you will see a published value of “no” in the assessments table. You can edit the assessment to make whatever changes you still need, then check the “published” checkbox to publish it later.

Once an assessment has been published, the assessment managers and other Isora GRC users can view and work with it on the assessment module when they log in.

Related content:

Next: 8.3 Working with notifications