Owning and Approving Policies

Policy Ownership

Whether you're going through an audit or sharing policies with customers, you want to make sure someone from your organization is in charge of consistently reviewing any documents that go out.

A policy's owner is responsible for ensuring that your organization is compliant with the controls within that policy, and conversely, that the policy accurately reflects what your organization is actually doing. Some policies (such as the Incident Response Policy) can bestow additional responsibilities on their owner, and you should make sure that the owner has carefully read and understood their role.

To assign an owner to a policy, navigate to the policy list by clicking Policies in the Trust Cloud sidebar, and click to view any policy. Once in an individual policy page, click the icon, or open the overflow ("...") menu and select Change Ownership to open the policy ownership assignment dialog. Once in this dialog, you can select the member of your Trust Cloud who should own this policy. If the owner of this policy is not yet in your Trust Cloud, you are welcome to invite them.

Approving Policies

All policies in your program start in a Pending state, which means that no person from your team has reviewed and approved their content. Once a policy is assigned an owner, that individual will be responsible for reviewing and approving any changes to the text of the policy. When a policy is edited, its owner will be assigned a task for adding an entry to the policy's approval log. As with all Trust Cloud tasks, once an approval record is added, the task will autocomplete.

A policy’s approval history can be accessed by clicking the overflow ("...") menu, and selecting View Approval History. You can use this panel to view previous approval records, delete them, or add new ones. Once approval records are added, they will default to appearing at the bottom of your exported policy PDF. Each line in the exported Approval History table will include the date, name, and role of the person who created the record, as well as an optional comment.

Once a policy has at least one approval record, its status will shift from Pending to Approved.

📽 Assigning & Approving Policies