Most organizations don’t have a GRC problem—they have an execution problem.
Too many GRC initiatives start with the best intentions: map the frameworks, check the boxes, appease auditors. But they end up bloated, siloed, or abandoned halfway through implementation. Why? Because GRC is often treated as a compliance function, not a business enabler.
Here’s how to shift the mindset and build a GRC program that’s sustainable, strategic, and actually works.
1. Start With Risk, Not Controls
A mature GRC program isn’t about checking boxes or showcasing a long list of implemented controls—it’s about understanding, managing, and reducing real risk to your organization.
✅ Map Risks to Business Objectives
Every organization operates with a unique set of strategic goals, whether that’s scaling a SaaS platform, safeguarding customer trust, or ensuring uptime for mission-critical services.
A GRC program should start by identifying the risks that could derail these objectives. Begin by engaging with business units to understand what truly matters to them. Then, map potential threats—cybersecurity events, third-party risks, regulatory noncompliance—to these goals.
This ensures that your risk management efforts are not theoretical but grounded in business reality.
✅ Prioritize by Likelihood and Impact
Once risks are mapped, prioritize them using a consistent risk assessment methodology. This typically includes estimating the likelihood of a risk materializing and the impact it would have if it did.
Not all risks deserve equal attention—treating a high-likelihood, high-impact data breach the same as a low-impact policy violation is a recipe for inefficiency.
Leverage risk heatmaps and scoring systems to rank and focus your efforts.
✅ Let Controls Follow Risk—Not the Other Way Around
Too often, organizations fall into the trap of letting control frameworks dictate their security and compliance posture. This leads to implementing controls that may not actually reduce the most relevant risks.
Instead, once you’ve identified and prioritized your risks, design or select controls that directly mitigate them. This ensures that every control you implement has a purpose and contributes to risk reduction.
This approach creates a risk-aligned control environment—one that adapts over time as risks evolve, rather than blindly chasing compliance requirements.
🤖 Frameworks Should Support, Not Drive, Risk Management
Frameworks like SOC 2, ISO/IEC 27001, or the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) offer valuable structure and industry alignment, but they are tools—not strategies.
These standards should help operationalize your risk management, not define it.
For example:
SOC 2 requires security controls—but which controls should be implemented depends on your risk landscape.
ISO 27001 calls for risk assessment and treatment plans—the value lies in how relevant and accurate those assessments are to your organization.
NIST CSF provides helpful categories, but they should be mapped to your specific risk priorities.
The goal is to use these frameworks to demonstrate that your risk-informed approach is systematic and effective—not to let the framework dictate actions that may not align with your actual risk exposure.
By building a GRC program that starts with risk, organizations become more adaptive, more efficient, and more strategically aligned. Compliance becomes a natural outcome of good risk management—not the goal.
2. Standardize GRC Operations Across Teams
Compliance and risk management are not the responsibility of a single department—they are enterprise-wide functions that require alignment, coordination, and visibility across all business units.
When GRC processes are managed ad hoc, siloed, or inconsistently across departments, it leads to inefficiencies, missed risks, and audit chaos.
A scalable, resilient GRC program depends on standardized operations that drive consistency, accountability, and transparency.
Here’s how to make it happen:
📑 Establish a GRC Operating Model
At the heart of standardized GRC operations is a clear, well-defined operating model.
This model outlines how risk and compliance activities are structured, governed, and executed across the enterprise. It includes:
Roles & Responsibilities: Who owns risk identification? Who updates controls? Who approves exceptions?
Governance Structures: Steering committees, risk councils, or compliance forums that meet regularly to review posture and decisions.
Operating Cadence: Routine activities like control attestations, risk reviews, and audit prep are scheduled and predictable.
A strong GRC operating model prevents critical activities from being reactive or overlooked. It embeds risk management into the business lifecycle—not just as a security or audit function.
🔁 Implement Shared Intake and Control Review Workflows
When risk or compliance issues arise—such as new regulations, vendor changes, or product launches—they should enter the organization through a shared intake process. This standardizes how:
New risks are assessed
Controls are added, reviewed, or retired
Exceptions are requested and approved
Leveraging GRC tools or platforms (e.g., ServiceNow, LogicGate, Archer) can streamline these workflows with built-in automation, status tracking, and audit trails. This ensures that every department—from Legal to Engineering—follows a consistent process when dealing with compliance-related decisions.
Shared workflows also support collaboration and transparency, so security and compliance are not bottlenecks, but enablers.
📈 Define and Track KPIs Across the Organization
To mature GRC operations, organizations must shift from reactive metrics (“Did we pass the audit?”) to proactive, continuous indicators of program health.
Key GRC metrics to track include:
Control Effectiveness: Percentage of controls passing self-assessment or independent testing
Open Risks: Number of unmitigated risks, their severity, and aging
Policy Exceptions: Volume, trends, and closure rates
Audit Readiness: Time to evidence, overdue items, audit findings
These metrics should be standardized and visible across the enterprise. Dashboards or regular reporting cycles can keep stakeholders accountable and informed.
🤝 Make GRC a Shared Responsibility
Security, compliance, and risk management don’t live in a vacuum.
Their success depends on distributed ownership:
Engineering: Ensures secure coding practices, vulnerability remediation, and change control
Legal: Reviews regulatory implications, data privacy requirements, and contract clauses
HR: Manages insider risk, employee onboarding/offboarding, and security awareness
Finance: Addresses SOX controls, fraud risk, and financial compliance
Standardizing GRC operations means embedding them into the daily workflows of these functions. This way, everyone becomes part of the GRC ecosystem—not just the security or compliance teams.
3. Automate What Matters
Manual compliance tracking may work at startup scale, but as your organization grows, so does the complexity and volume of your GRC activities.
Spreadsheets, emails, and shared drives quickly become bottlenecks. Worse, they introduce human error, audit gaps, and inconsistent practices.
The key to scaling a modern GRC program is automation with purpose—but automation alone isn’t the solution. If your current processes are disjointed, automating them only accelerates the chaos.
🚫 Don't Automate Chaos
Before jumping into automation, take a step back. Ask:
Are our risk and control processes clearly defined?
Do we have standard workflows for evidence collection, policy updates, and exception requests?
Are roles and responsibilities documented and understood?
If the answer is no, automation will amplify confusion. Automation should enforce consistency, not create digital spaghetti.
Rule of thumb: Standardize workflows and governance structures first, then layer automation on top to enforce and streamline them.
✅ What to Automate in a Mature GRC Program
Once you’ve standardized your foundational processes, automation can transform your GRC operations. Focus on areas where manual effort is high, error-prone, or time-sensitive:
📁 Evidence Collection
Say goodbye to the audit scramble. GRC platforms like Vanta, ServiceNow, or OneTrust can automatically collect system logs, configuration data, access control reports, and more. Integrations with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and SaaS tools (Okta, Jira, Slack) eliminate the need to chase stakeholders for screenshots or documentation.
Benefits:
Continuous control monitoring
Real-time audit readiness
Reduced time-to-evidence
📊 Control Health Dashboards
It’s no longer enough to know whether controls exist—you need to know if they’re working.
GRC tools can visualize control status, ownership, test results, and aging issues in real-time dashboards.
Benefits:
Proactive remediation
Executive visibility
Centralized control performance tracking
📜 Policy Lifecycle Management
From drafting to approval to attestation, the policy management lifecycle is full of friction points. Automating the versioning, review cycles, distribution, and user attestation processes helps ensure compliance and accountability.
Benefits:
Consistent updates and reviews
Evidence of policy acknowledgment
Automated renewal reminders
🧠 Risk Assessments
Whether it’s IT risk, vendor risk, or product risk, assessment workflows can be automated with forms, scoring logic, and review workflows. Tools like OneTrust or LogicGate allow dynamic risk profiling based on business impact and exposure.
Benefits:
Repeatable risk scoring
Automated risk reviews
Integrated risk registers
🔄 Integration Is the Secret Weapon
The true power of automation is unlocked when GRC platforms integrate across your ecosystem—HR systems, ticketing tools, cloud infrastructure, and identity providers. This creates a living, breathing GRC program that updates with your environment in real time.
⚠️ Avoid the Trap of Tool-First Thinking
Buying a GRC tool without a strategy is like buying a Ferrari without knowing how to drive. You’ll get speed—but probably end up in a ditch.
Start by:
Defining your key risk and compliance workflows
Identifying where automation adds the most value
Selecting tools that align with your business and technical environment
4. Build for Multi-Framework Compliance
As organizations grow, they often find themselves needing to comply with multiple cybersecurity, privacy, and regulatory frameworks. SOC 2 for customer trust. ISO 27001 for global operations. HIPAA for healthcare. PCI DSS for payment processing. NIST CSF for risk management.
Too often, these frameworks are treated in isolation, resulting in duplicated effort, fragmented documentation, and compliance fatigue.
Instead of managing frameworks independently, mature GRC programs build a unified compliance architecture—one that enables cross-framework alignment, control reuse, and centralized oversight.
🎯 Centralize Control Mapping Across Frameworks
At the heart of a multi-framework strategy is the concept of control harmonization. Many controls overlap across frameworks. For example:
Access control is required by SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and NIST 800-53.
Change management, encryption, and incident response are also common themes.
Rather than implementing separate controls for each framework, organizations should map multiple requirements to a single, well-defined control. GRC tools like OneTrust, Vanta, or ServiceNow IRM support this kind of crosswalk mapping using built-in or custom control libraries.
Benefits:
Fewer controls to manage
Reduced compliance workload
Greater consistency in implementation
📚 Maintain a Single Source of Truth
Documentation sprawl is the enemy of efficient compliance. When teams store evidence in scattered locations—or worse, different versions of the same document—it leads to confusion and audit risk.
Create and maintain a centralized compliance repository that serves as the single source of truth for:
Controls and their mappings
Policies and procedures
Risk assessments
Audit evidence and artifacts
Use versioning, access control, and metadata tagging to ensure that everyone—from auditors to internal stakeholders—is working from the same playbook.
🔁 Reuse Evidence and Audit Artifacts
One of the biggest opportunities for efficiency is evidence reuse. A single access control report can satisfy SOC 2, ISO, and HIPAA. So why pull it three times?
A unified GRC platform allows you to:
Tag artifacts with the frameworks they support
Link them to multiple control mappings
Track expiration dates and review cycles
The result: less burden on teams, faster audit readiness, and reduced human error.
🚀 Less Fatigue. More Reuse. Better Visibility.
This approach creates a compliance multiplier effect—where a single action (like conducting a risk assessment or implementing a technical control) supports multiple obligations at once. It streamlines operations, increases stakeholder confidence, and scales as your compliance needs evolve.
Most importantly, it shifts compliance from being a reactive burden to a strategic capability.
5. Report Like a Business Function
Too often, GRC teams report in the language of auditors: spreadsheets of control failures, audit findings, and remediation status updates. But when it comes to engaging executive leadership and board members, this technical lens falls short.
CISOs, risk officers, and GRC leaders need to report like a business function—speaking in terms of risk, impact, outcomes, and return on investment. Effective GRC reporting should drive strategic decision-making, not just satisfy compliance checklists.
🎯 Executives Don’t Want Technical Jargon—They Want Business Insight
To earn executive buy-in and elevate the GRC function, reports must answer questions that business leaders actually care about:
🔥 What Are the Top Residual Risks?
Boards are less concerned with how many risks you’ve identified—and more concerned with what still keeps you up at night after controls are applied. Focus on:
High-impact risks with insufficient mitigation
Risks tied to core business functions (e.g., customer data, financial systems, or IP)
Risk trends over time (improving vs. deteriorating)
This helps the board understand what exposures still exist and where investment or escalation may be needed.
⚖️ What Is the Business Impact of Non-Compliance?
Help leadership connect the dots between compliance failures and potential real-world consequences, such as:
Regulatory fines
Revenue impact (loss of certifications or market access)
Reputational damage
Breach of contractual obligations
Using business impact assessments in GRC reporting shifts the conversation from “checklist risk” to strategic and operational risk.
📉 How Effective Are Our Controls—And Is It Improving?
Use trend data to show how your control environment is maturing:
% of controls tested and passed
Frequency of control failures
Time to remediation
Visualizing control health trends allows stakeholders to see the trajectory of your program, not just a static snapshot.
💰 What’s the ROI of Our GRC Investments?
Whether it’s investing in a new GRC platform, increasing headcount, or conducting a third-party risk review, boards want to know: What did we get for the money?
Build ROI narratives around:
Time saved through automation
Reduced audit findings year-over-year
Faster remediation cycles
Avoided penalties or contract risks
This is especially important as GRC functions increasingly compete for budget alongside product, sales, and IT.
📊 Build Dashboards That Belong in the Boardroom
Use modern GRC platforms and BI tools to visualize:
Risk heatmaps
Audit readiness scores
Risk and control trends over time
Policy attestation rates
Compliance gaps by business unit or geography
Dashboards should be tailored by audience. What resonates with the GRC team won’t necessarily land with the CFO or CEO. Align your reporting format with executive expectations.
🎯 Outcome-Driven Reporting = Strategic GRC
By reporting like a business function, GRC becomes a strategic enabler, not just a compliance cost center. You demonstrate how governance, risk, and compliance activities support business growth, reduce exposure, and create long-term value.
Final Thoughts
GRC isn't just policy and paperwork—it's how an organization builds trust at scale.
The best programs are:
✔️ Risk-driven
✔️ Business-aligned
✔️ Operationally embedded
✔️ Continuously improving
Get those right, and your GRC program won’t just pass audits—it’ll drive resilience, efficiency, and strategic clarity.