Most companies treat compliance management as a cost center, a checkbox exercise that drains engineering time and produces a PDF once a year. That framing is increasingly wrong. Compliance has quietly become one of the most reliable predictors of how fast a B2B company can close enterprise deals, pass investor diligence, and expand into new markets. The companies that figure this out early build a structural advantage. Everyone else ends up paying for it later, usually under deadline pressure.
The work itself has also changed. A few years ago, running a compliance program meant a small team pulling screenshots, updating spreadsheets, and chasing engineers for evidence. Today, platforms run hourly tests against connected systems, AI agents draft policies and answer security questionnaires, and continuous monitoring has replaced point-in-time audits as enterprise customers increasingly expect. The teams running modern programs spend their time reviewing exceptions, not collecting evidence.
This article is for the people sitting in the gap between those two worlds. You'll learn what compliance management is, why it matters, the components every program needs, who owns the work as a company grows, the steps to running a continuous program, the challenges that derail most teams, and how AI is reshaping the discipline. Whether you're standing up a first program or scaling an existing one across multiple frameworks, the goal is the same. Build something continuous, automated, and tied to actual business outcomes.
What is compliance management?
Compliance management is an ongoing process of implementing and overseeing control requirements and processes necessary for adhering to the applicable standards and regulations.
On a broad level, compliance management means your organization does the following:
- Keeps track of the regulatory landscape to identify the applicable mandatory regulations and voluntary standards
- Implements the controls necessary to comply with the selected regulations and/or standards
- Updates controls according to regulatory changes and bridges compliance gaps as they appear
Completing these activities efficiently ensures you don’t fall behind on your regulatory obligations.
{{cta_withimage22="/cta-blocks"}} | The Audit ready checklist
Why is compliance management important?
Successful compliance management helps you avoid disruptions caused by unaddressed regulatory gaps, such as:
- Hefty fines and non-financial penalties
- Loss of business
- Damaged stakeholder trust
Still, compliance management doesn’t just help prevent regulatory disruptions—it also plays a key role in broader risk management and governance. While compliance management is often viewed as a practice focused primarily on implementing legal, regulatory, and organizational standards, it's actually a component of a larger Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (GRC) strategy.
Managing your compliance posture is one of the benefits of GRC that compounds over time. It enables proactive risk management, lets your organization uphold the governance principles that support continued operations, and ultimately serves the customers who depend on you.
While there is an overlap between compliance and risk management in achieving scalable GRC, there’s a notable difference between risk management and compliance. Risk management is a broader concept that encompasses compliance management while addressing various risks, such as:
- Strategic
- Financial
- Operational
- Legal
- Reputational
- Health and Safety
With this in mind, compliance management contributes to effective risk management, which lets you navigate the threat landscape more confidently. This applies to both immediate threats like cybersecurity concerns and more indirect ones like loss of reputation, as maintaining compliance is not just about avoiding financial penalties and legal repercussions—it can also be a strategic differentiator in competitive markets.
6 components of compliance management
Most compliance programs that fail are missing one of these building blocks, not all of them. Effective compliance management revolves around six components:
1. Strategies for governance
Organizational compliance requires high-ranking officers to develop and execute compliance strategies. Roles and responsibilities must be clearly defined to ensure accountability and identify any sources of compliance program blocks. Without clear ownership, the program drifts and accountability disappears at the first conflict with shipping deadlines.
2. Policies and procedures to support implementation
Strong compliance policy management enables organization-wide adherence to the applicable standards by outlining the obligations and best practices everyone should follow. Policies state what the company commits to doing. Procedures describe how those commitments get carried out day to day. Both have to be written down, accessible to the people who need them, and reviewed regularly.
3. Training and awareness
Most major frameworks require security awareness training because most compliance failures happen at the human layer. New hires need onboarding training. Existing staff need refresher training, usually annually. Role-specific training (engineers on secure coding, finance on SOX controls, customer-facing teams on data handling) catches the gaps that generic training misses.
4. A complementary risk management program
Compliance risk management sits inside broader risk management, not beside it. It must be aligned with the organization's risk profile and encompass the necessary risk treatment strategies. The controls you implement should match your actual risk profile, with the highest-risk areas getting the most rigorous controls.
5. Reporting workflows
Your compliance reporting should follow a clear chain of command and straightforward procedures. Compliance problems get fixed when they surface fast. A working program defines who reports what to whom, on what cadence, and what triggers an escalation. Without that, gaps sit unaddressed until an auditor finds them.
6. Regular audits and continuous compliance
Identify which audits are necessary for your organization. In many cases, you should also set up continuous control monitoring, as this helps with early identification of compliance gaps rather than waiting for external audits to find them. Audits prove the program works, but only if there's evidence to show, so build evidence collection into the program rather than scrambling for it at audit time.
{{cta_withimage3="/cta-blocks"}} | The ultimate guide to scaling compliance
Who owns compliance management
Compliance management isn't a job title at most companies. It's a responsibility that gets assigned somewhere, and the where changes as the company grows. Four common ownership patterns map roughly to the four maturity stages, and knowing which one you're in tells you whether you need to hire, outsource, or restructure.
Founder-led
At pre-seed and seed-stage companies, the CEO or technical co-founder owns compliance because there's no one else. They're writing the first policies, sitting in the first audit kickoff, and answering the first security questionnaire personally. This pattern stops working once enterprise sales start moving in volume, usually somewhere between 30 and 75 employees, depending on whether security is part of the product or part of the sales motion.
Engineering-led
A CTO or head of engineering inherits the work. It usually lives alongside production responsibilities, which means compliance gets pushed when there's a production fire. This pattern is fragile but common at Series A and Series B companies. The signal it's time to move on is when audit prep starts blocking shipping, or when security reviews start blocking deals more than once a quarter.
First dedicated hire
Somewhere between 75 and 200 employees, most companies hire their first security or GRC person. The right profile depends on the company's risk surface. SaaS companies often hire a security engineer who absorbs compliance. Healthcare, fintech, and defense companies more often hire a compliance specialist who works with engineering. Either way, this person owns the program and reports to the CTO, COO, or CISO.
Full GRC team
At enterprise scale, compliance becomes its own function with a head of GRC, a risk lead, and one or more analysts. The team often reports to a CISO or chief risk officer. The work splits across compliance management, vendor risk, and internal audit, with separate owners for each.
The transitions between these stages rarely happen on schedule. Companies stay in engineering-led mode too long, hire too late, or build a full GRC team before the program needs one. The right move at any given moment is the one that matches where the program actually is, not where the org chart suggests it should be.
7 steps to the compliance management process
To develop and implement a continuous compliance management process that is built with continuous improvement in mind, follow these steps:
1. Scope your obligations
Identify which regulations, frameworks, and contractual commitments apply to the business. That includes laws tied to where you operate (GDPR, CCPA), the security compliance frameworks most enterprise buyers expect (SOC 2, ISO 27001), sector requirements (HIPAA, PCI DSS), and any commitments buried in customer contracts. The deliverable is a written register of obligations with named owners.
2. Initial assessment (gap analysis)
Each time you select a regulation or standard to implement, assess your current compliance posture against the corresponding requirements to identify gaps. Where do existing controls already satisfy a requirement? Where are the holes? The deliverable is a prioritized list of gaps and a risk register that ranks them by likelihood and impact.
3. Design controls and policies
Translate obligations into controls (what we do) and policies (what we say we do). A control might be "all production access requires MFA." The matching policy documents that rule and assigns ownership. The deliverable is a control library mapped to frameworks and a policy set ready for review.
4. Implementation
After outlining and analyzing compliance gaps, develop and execute a remediation plan that accounts for all deficiencies and ensures full compliance with the applicable regulation. The plan will typically involve implementing new policies, procedures, and processes aligned with the regulation’s requirements.
5. Monitoring and enforcement
Monitor the performance of the implemented controls to ensure they meet all the relevant requirements. If the chosen regulation or standard requires cross-department collaboration (which is often the case), ensure that department heads enforce the changes on their respective teams.
6. Audit
With the required controls in place, perform the internal or external compliance audits necessary for demonstrating compliance with your chosen standard. Run an internal compliance audit first to catch gaps before an external auditor does, then set up a control process that keeps you aligned with the relevant requirements year-round.
7. Continuous improvement
Build a control compliance management workflow that lets you monitor your controls to ensure they remain in place and are effective. Monitor changes in applicable regulations and ensure your controls stay aligned with the latest requirements. Feed any gaps identified here back through your compliance management process.
Challenges to business compliance management
The main challenge organizations face with compliance management is staying on top of the fast-changing regulatory environment. Besides updates to the existing regulations, you might need to keep achieving compliance with new ones to ensure uninterrupted operations.
A good example of this is the increased adoption of AI. After being largely unregulated for a few years, the technology is now facing a comprehensive legal framework.
Similar to how GDPR set the standard for privacy and ISO 27001 for information security governance, AI regulations and frameworks—such as the EU AI Act and ISO 42001—are expected to establish new industry benchmarks and set the path for many countries to follow. Some organizations may not be fully prepared for these changes, especially where they are third-party vendors to the customers they serve.
Another major obstacle is a lack of streamlined compliance workflows. Organizations often rely on manual processes, which can slow down ongoing compliance and prevent organizations from swiftly responding to changes in the regulatory landscape.
In addition, organizations operating in multiple regions need to navigate overlapping and sometimes conflicting regulatory requirements, which can further hinder compliance management efforts.
You can avoid this problem by following some proven best practices.
Compliance management best practices to follow
To make your compliance program efficient and scalable, follow these practices:
To make your compliance program efficient and scalable, follow these practices:
Build repeatable processes
Replace one-off and ad-hoc tasks with consistent, repeatable processes around which you’ll build a compliance management program. Document your procedures and build a knowledge base with tools and processes you can apply across different compliance efforts.
Enable integration and harmonization
Siloed teams, tools, and processes slow down your compliance program. Aim to combine them into a unified compliance program that fosters streamlined collaboration and eliminates disparate systems.
Account for future changes
Approach updates to the compliance landscape proactively by following the regulatory trends in your industry (including technological advances, security trends, etc.).
Invest in an automated compliance platform
A well-designed compliance software can automate various compliance processes, enable continuous monitoring, and provide a single pane of glass for stakeholders to get real-time insights into the organization's compliance program.
How automation and AI are changing compliance management
Automation in compliance management used to mean scheduled scripts that pulled evidence on a recurring basis. AI has pushed the discipline further. Systems can now draft, decide, and act on behalf of the team, not just collect.
The clearest wins so far are in four areas. The first is policy generation, where AI drafts policies from a few prompts and keeps them aligned with chosen frameworks. The second is questionnaire automation, where AI answers customer security reviews from a knowledge base while humans review rather than write. The third is evidence evaluation, where AI checks uploaded evidence against control criteria and flags anything that looks insufficient before the auditor sees it. The fourth is SLA-based remediation, where AI surfaces controls likely to breach SLAs and prioritizes the queue.
The limits matter too. AI is still bad at high-judgment exceptions, novel regulatory interpretation, and anything that requires reading between the lines of a contract. Treat it as a force multiplier for the 80% of work that's repetitive, not as a replacement for the 20% that requires human judgment.
The numbers from agentic platforms suggest the gap is real. According to an IDC white paper sponsored by Vanta, Vanta customers report a 526% three-year ROI with payback in three months. Trust Center self-serve rates of up to 87% mean fewer than one in seven customer security reviews requires human handling. Questionnaire completion runs up to 81% faster with AI assistance.
Vanta: Your automated compliance management platform
Vanta is a compliance and trust management platform that automates up to 90% of work associated with 35+ major standards and regulations. It does this through a comprehensive automated compliance software product, which includes numerous resources and features, such as:
- Automated evidence collection supported by over 400 integrations
- Centralized control documentation
- Real-time control monitoring through automated hourly tests
- Pre-built and custom controls with a capable policy builder
- Out-of-the-box awareness/training videos
Vanta AI can also help you streamline tedious tasks and workflows like conducting vendor security reviews, answering security questionnaires and efficiently mapping and maintaining your existing controls.
If you want to learn more about these features and see them in action, schedule a custom demo of Vanta’s automated compliance product.
{{cta_simple7="/cta-blocks"}} | Automated compliance product page
Compliance
What is compliance management and how do I implement it?
Looking to upgrade to continuous, automated GRC and get visibility across your entire program?
Most companies treat compliance management as a cost center, a checkbox exercise that drains engineering time and produces a PDF once a year. That framing is increasingly wrong. Compliance has quietly become one of the most reliable predictors of how fast a B2B company can close enterprise deals, pass investor diligence, and expand into new markets. The companies that figure this out early build a structural advantage. Everyone else ends up paying for it later, usually under deadline pressure.
The work itself has also changed. A few years ago, running a compliance program meant a small team pulling screenshots, updating spreadsheets, and chasing engineers for evidence. Today, platforms run hourly tests against connected systems, AI agents draft policies and answer security questionnaires, and continuous monitoring has replaced point-in-time audits as enterprise customers increasingly expect. The teams running modern programs spend their time reviewing exceptions, not collecting evidence.
This article is for the people sitting in the gap between those two worlds. You'll learn what compliance management is, why it matters, the components every program needs, who owns the work as a company grows, the steps to running a continuous program, the challenges that derail most teams, and how AI is reshaping the discipline. Whether you're standing up a first program or scaling an existing one across multiple frameworks, the goal is the same. Build something continuous, automated, and tied to actual business outcomes.
What is compliance management?
Compliance management is an ongoing process of implementing and overseeing control requirements and processes necessary for adhering to the applicable standards and regulations.
On a broad level, compliance management means your organization does the following:
- Keeps track of the regulatory landscape to identify the applicable mandatory regulations and voluntary standards
- Implements the controls necessary to comply with the selected regulations and/or standards
- Updates controls according to regulatory changes and bridges compliance gaps as they appear
Completing these activities efficiently ensures you don’t fall behind on your regulatory obligations.
{{cta_withimage22="/cta-blocks"}} | The Audit ready checklist
Why is compliance management important?
Successful compliance management helps you avoid disruptions caused by unaddressed regulatory gaps, such as:
- Hefty fines and non-financial penalties
- Loss of business
- Damaged stakeholder trust
Still, compliance management doesn’t just help prevent regulatory disruptions—it also plays a key role in broader risk management and governance. While compliance management is often viewed as a practice focused primarily on implementing legal, regulatory, and organizational standards, it's actually a component of a larger Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (GRC) strategy.
Managing your compliance posture is one of the benefits of GRC that compounds over time. It enables proactive risk management, lets your organization uphold the governance principles that support continued operations, and ultimately serves the customers who depend on you.
While there is an overlap between compliance and risk management in achieving scalable GRC, there’s a notable difference between risk management and compliance. Risk management is a broader concept that encompasses compliance management while addressing various risks, such as:
- Strategic
- Financial
- Operational
- Legal
- Reputational
- Health and Safety
With this in mind, compliance management contributes to effective risk management, which lets you navigate the threat landscape more confidently. This applies to both immediate threats like cybersecurity concerns and more indirect ones like loss of reputation, as maintaining compliance is not just about avoiding financial penalties and legal repercussions—it can also be a strategic differentiator in competitive markets.
6 components of compliance management
Most compliance programs that fail are missing one of these building blocks, not all of them. Effective compliance management revolves around six components:
1. Strategies for governance
Organizational compliance requires high-ranking officers to develop and execute compliance strategies. Roles and responsibilities must be clearly defined to ensure accountability and identify any sources of compliance program blocks. Without clear ownership, the program drifts and accountability disappears at the first conflict with shipping deadlines.
2. Policies and procedures to support implementation
Strong compliance policy management enables organization-wide adherence to the applicable standards by outlining the obligations and best practices everyone should follow. Policies state what the company commits to doing. Procedures describe how those commitments get carried out day to day. Both have to be written down, accessible to the people who need them, and reviewed regularly.
3. Training and awareness
Most major frameworks require security awareness training because most compliance failures happen at the human layer. New hires need onboarding training. Existing staff need refresher training, usually annually. Role-specific training (engineers on secure coding, finance on SOX controls, customer-facing teams on data handling) catches the gaps that generic training misses.
4. A complementary risk management program
Compliance risk management sits inside broader risk management, not beside it. It must be aligned with the organization's risk profile and encompass the necessary risk treatment strategies. The controls you implement should match your actual risk profile, with the highest-risk areas getting the most rigorous controls.
5. Reporting workflows
Your compliance reporting should follow a clear chain of command and straightforward procedures. Compliance problems get fixed when they surface fast. A working program defines who reports what to whom, on what cadence, and what triggers an escalation. Without that, gaps sit unaddressed until an auditor finds them.
6. Regular audits and continuous compliance
Identify which audits are necessary for your organization. In many cases, you should also set up continuous control monitoring, as this helps with early identification of compliance gaps rather than waiting for external audits to find them. Audits prove the program works, but only if there's evidence to show, so build evidence collection into the program rather than scrambling for it at audit time.
{{cta_withimage3="/cta-blocks"}} | The ultimate guide to scaling compliance
Who owns compliance management
Compliance management isn't a job title at most companies. It's a responsibility that gets assigned somewhere, and the where changes as the company grows. Four common ownership patterns map roughly to the four maturity stages, and knowing which one you're in tells you whether you need to hire, outsource, or restructure.
Founder-led
At pre-seed and seed-stage companies, the CEO or technical co-founder owns compliance because there's no one else. They're writing the first policies, sitting in the first audit kickoff, and answering the first security questionnaire personally. This pattern stops working once enterprise sales start moving in volume, usually somewhere between 30 and 75 employees, depending on whether security is part of the product or part of the sales motion.
Engineering-led
A CTO or head of engineering inherits the work. It usually lives alongside production responsibilities, which means compliance gets pushed when there's a production fire. This pattern is fragile but common at Series A and Series B companies. The signal it's time to move on is when audit prep starts blocking shipping, or when security reviews start blocking deals more than once a quarter.
First dedicated hire
Somewhere between 75 and 200 employees, most companies hire their first security or GRC person. The right profile depends on the company's risk surface. SaaS companies often hire a security engineer who absorbs compliance. Healthcare, fintech, and defense companies more often hire a compliance specialist who works with engineering. Either way, this person owns the program and reports to the CTO, COO, or CISO.
Full GRC team
At enterprise scale, compliance becomes its own function with a head of GRC, a risk lead, and one or more analysts. The team often reports to a CISO or chief risk officer. The work splits across compliance management, vendor risk, and internal audit, with separate owners for each.
The transitions between these stages rarely happen on schedule. Companies stay in engineering-led mode too long, hire too late, or build a full GRC team before the program needs one. The right move at any given moment is the one that matches where the program actually is, not where the org chart suggests it should be.
7 steps to the compliance management process
To develop and implement a continuous compliance management process that is built with continuous improvement in mind, follow these steps:
1. Scope your obligations
Identify which regulations, frameworks, and contractual commitments apply to the business. That includes laws tied to where you operate (GDPR, CCPA), the security compliance frameworks most enterprise buyers expect (SOC 2, ISO 27001), sector requirements (HIPAA, PCI DSS), and any commitments buried in customer contracts. The deliverable is a written register of obligations with named owners.
2. Initial assessment (gap analysis)
Each time you select a regulation or standard to implement, assess your current compliance posture against the corresponding requirements to identify gaps. Where do existing controls already satisfy a requirement? Where are the holes? The deliverable is a prioritized list of gaps and a risk register that ranks them by likelihood and impact.
3. Design controls and policies
Translate obligations into controls (what we do) and policies (what we say we do). A control might be "all production access requires MFA." The matching policy documents that rule and assigns ownership. The deliverable is a control library mapped to frameworks and a policy set ready for review.
4. Implementation
After outlining and analyzing compliance gaps, develop and execute a remediation plan that accounts for all deficiencies and ensures full compliance with the applicable regulation. The plan will typically involve implementing new policies, procedures, and processes aligned with the regulation’s requirements.
5. Monitoring and enforcement
Monitor the performance of the implemented controls to ensure they meet all the relevant requirements. If the chosen regulation or standard requires cross-department collaboration (which is often the case), ensure that department heads enforce the changes on their respective teams.
6. Audit
With the required controls in place, perform the internal or external compliance audits necessary for demonstrating compliance with your chosen standard. Run an internal compliance audit first to catch gaps before an external auditor does, then set up a control process that keeps you aligned with the relevant requirements year-round.
7. Continuous improvement
Build a control compliance management workflow that lets you monitor your controls to ensure they remain in place and are effective. Monitor changes in applicable regulations and ensure your controls stay aligned with the latest requirements. Feed any gaps identified here back through your compliance management process.
Challenges to business compliance management
The main challenge organizations face with compliance management is staying on top of the fast-changing regulatory environment. Besides updates to the existing regulations, you might need to keep achieving compliance with new ones to ensure uninterrupted operations.
A good example of this is the increased adoption of AI. After being largely unregulated for a few years, the technology is now facing a comprehensive legal framework.
Similar to how GDPR set the standard for privacy and ISO 27001 for information security governance, AI regulations and frameworks—such as the EU AI Act and ISO 42001—are expected to establish new industry benchmarks and set the path for many countries to follow. Some organizations may not be fully prepared for these changes, especially where they are third-party vendors to the customers they serve.
Another major obstacle is a lack of streamlined compliance workflows. Organizations often rely on manual processes, which can slow down ongoing compliance and prevent organizations from swiftly responding to changes in the regulatory landscape.
In addition, organizations operating in multiple regions need to navigate overlapping and sometimes conflicting regulatory requirements, which can further hinder compliance management efforts.
You can avoid this problem by following some proven best practices.
Compliance management best practices to follow
To make your compliance program efficient and scalable, follow these practices:
To make your compliance program efficient and scalable, follow these practices:
Build repeatable processes
Replace one-off and ad-hoc tasks with consistent, repeatable processes around which you’ll build a compliance management program. Document your procedures and build a knowledge base with tools and processes you can apply across different compliance efforts.
Enable integration and harmonization
Siloed teams, tools, and processes slow down your compliance program. Aim to combine them into a unified compliance program that fosters streamlined collaboration and eliminates disparate systems.
Account for future changes
Approach updates to the compliance landscape proactively by following the regulatory trends in your industry (including technological advances, security trends, etc.).
Invest in an automated compliance platform
A well-designed compliance software can automate various compliance processes, enable continuous monitoring, and provide a single pane of glass for stakeholders to get real-time insights into the organization's compliance program.
How automation and AI are changing compliance management
Automation in compliance management used to mean scheduled scripts that pulled evidence on a recurring basis. AI has pushed the discipline further. Systems can now draft, decide, and act on behalf of the team, not just collect.
The clearest wins so far are in four areas. The first is policy generation, where AI drafts policies from a few prompts and keeps them aligned with chosen frameworks. The second is questionnaire automation, where AI answers customer security reviews from a knowledge base while humans review rather than write. The third is evidence evaluation, where AI checks uploaded evidence against control criteria and flags anything that looks insufficient before the auditor sees it. The fourth is SLA-based remediation, where AI surfaces controls likely to breach SLAs and prioritizes the queue.
The limits matter too. AI is still bad at high-judgment exceptions, novel regulatory interpretation, and anything that requires reading between the lines of a contract. Treat it as a force multiplier for the 80% of work that's repetitive, not as a replacement for the 20% that requires human judgment.
The numbers from agentic platforms suggest the gap is real. According to an IDC white paper sponsored by Vanta, Vanta customers report a 526% three-year ROI with payback in three months. Trust Center self-serve rates of up to 87% mean fewer than one in seven customer security reviews requires human handling. Questionnaire completion runs up to 81% faster with AI assistance.
Vanta: Your automated compliance management platform
Vanta is a compliance and trust management platform that automates up to 90% of work associated with 35+ major standards and regulations. It does this through a comprehensive automated compliance software product, which includes numerous resources and features, such as:
- Automated evidence collection supported by over 400 integrations
- Centralized control documentation
- Real-time control monitoring through automated hourly tests
- Pre-built and custom controls with a capable policy builder
- Out-of-the-box awareness/training videos
Vanta AI can also help you streamline tedious tasks and workflows like conducting vendor security reviews, answering security questionnaires and efficiently mapping and maintaining your existing controls.
If you want to learn more about these features and see them in action, schedule a custom demo of Vanta’s automated compliance product.
{{cta_simple7="/cta-blocks"}} | Automated compliance product page
| Role: | GRC responsibilities: |
|---|---|
| Board of directors | Central to the overarching GRC strategy, this group sets the direction for the compliance strategy. They determine which standards and regulations are necessary for compliance and align the GRC strategy with business objectives. |
| Chief financial officer | Primary responsibility for the success of the GRC program and for reporting results to the board. |
| Operations managers from relevant departments | This group owns processes. They are responsible for the success and direction of risk management and compliance within their departments. |
| Representatives from relevant departments | These are the activity owners. These team members are responsible for carrying out specific compliance and risk management tasks within their departments and for integrating these tasks into their workflows. |
| Contract managers from relevant department | These team members are responsible for managing interactions with vendors and other third parties in their department to ensure all risk management and compliance measures are being taken. |
| Chief information security officer (CISO) | Defines the organization’s information security policy, designs risk and vulnerability assessments, and develops information security policies. |
| Data protection officer (DPO) or legal counsel | Develops goals for data privacy based on legal regulations and other compliance needs, designs and implements privacy policies and practices, and assesses these practices for effectiveness. |
| GRC lead | Responsible for overseeing the execution of the GRC program in collaboration with the executive team as well as maintaining the organization’s library of security controls. |
| Cybersecurity analyst(s) | Implements and monitors cybersecurity measures that are in line with the GRC program and business objectives. |
| Compliance analyst(s) | Monitors the organization’s compliance with all regulations and standards necessary, identifies any compliance gaps, and works to mitigate them. |
| Risk analyst(s) | Carries out the risk management program for the organization and serves as a resource for risk management across various departments, including identifying, mitigating, and monitoring risks. |
| IT security specialist(s) | Implements security controls within the IT system in coordination with the cybersecurity analyst(s). |
Explore more GRC articles
Introduction to GRC
Implementing a GRC program
Optimizing a GRC program
Governance
Risk
Compliance
Continuous control monitoring
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