Keeping up with all the changes in the security and compliance landscape can be demanding. It requires a systematic approach to control implementation and monitoring and a comprehensive risk management strategy.
Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) programs enable such a holistic approach. They unify teams, processes, and IT systems under a single, organization-wide strategy aligned with the organization’s overarching business objectives.
Developing and implementing an effective GRC framework is a complex task, and this article will guide you through the process to give you a head start. We’ll cover:
- The definition and components of GRC
- Benefits of an effective GRC strategy
- GRC roles and responsibilities
- Five implementation steps to follow
What exactly is GRC?
GRC (governance, risk, compliance) is an integrated approach to the implementation and oversight of different governance, risk management, and compliance activities. The table below offers a high-level overview of its key components:
{{cta_withimage8="/cta-blocks"}}
The three get named together because they share inputs and fail together. A control exists because governance decided it should. It gets prioritized because risk work said it mattered. It gets evidenced because a framework requires proof. When those three activities live in different tools owned by different people, the same access review gets run once for the auditor, once for the risk register, and once for the policy owner, and the three records disagree by the end of the quarter.
The overlaps you see here aren’t accidental—all GRC activities must be closely related to form a unified program instead of being siloed in standalone strategies. There are several reasons for this, most notably:
- Ever-evolving cybersecurity threats: The number and complexity of cybersecurity threats increase continuously, calling for an integrated security approach that goes beyond technical controls. Your organization must comply with all the necessary security regulations and develop a culture of threat awareness at all levels.
- Frequent changes to an organization’s regulatory landscape: Your compliance posture and obligations change at all times, so you need to replace point-in-time assessments and updates with continuous monitoring to keep up and ensure ongoing compliance.
- The need for advanced data privacy and security strategies: Data security goes beyond your IT infrastructure and must also encompass people and processes. This calls for a comprehensive approach to security that combines all components of GRC.
- Complex and diverse third-party relationships: Besides managing your own risk posture, you must closely monitor your third-party network through a comprehensive risk management strategy to avoid exploited external vulnerabilities.
The three pillars of GRC
Each pillar carries its own artifacts, its own owner, and its own way of going wrong. They also depend on each other in sequence, since governance defines what you're protecting, risk management finds what threatens it, and compliance proves the result to people outside your company. Most programs get built in reverse, starting from a compliance deadline and working backward, which is workable but tends to leave the governance layer thin.
Governance
Governance is the part people skip, and skipping it is why programs stall. It answers two questions before any control gets written. What is this organization trying to protect, and how much risk will leadership accept to keep moving?
In practice that means a set of approved policies, a named owner for each one, a defined control set, and a documented statement of risk appetite. The artifacts matter less than the decision rights behind them. If nobody can tell you who approves an exception to your access policy, you have policy documents but no governance.
Risk management
Risk management identifies what could stop you from hitting those objectives, ranks it, and decides what to do about each item. The output is a risk register with owners, scores, and treatment decisions recorded against every entry.
Treatment is where most registers go quiet. Every risk gets one of four outcomes. You mitigate it with a control, transfer it through insurance or a contract, avoid it by not doing the thing, or accept it and write down who accepted it. A register full of identified risks and empty of treatment decisions is a list, not a program.
Compliance
Compliance proves adherence to specific obligations. Those come from regulation such as HIPAA or GDPR, from voluntary frameworks such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001, and from contracts your sales team signed.
The work splits into two halves that people conflate. Mapping is deciding which of your controls satisfies which requirement across every framework you're pursuing. Evidence is proving those controls operated over a defined period. Mapping is a one-time design problem that pays off permanently. Evidence is a recurring collection problem that compounds with every framework you add, which is why the second framework hurts more than the first.
How GRC compares to IRM, ERM, and GRC engineering
As we define GRC through the various activities an organization performs to operate while managing risk, we must differentiate between the levels at which these activities are conducted. In this context, we can separate traditional GRC from enterprise governance risk and compliance (EGRC).
Four terms circle the same territory, and vendors use them loosely enough that the distinctions have blurred. Here's what separates them.
The GRC and IRM distinction is mostly about which function sets priorities. Under GRC, an upcoming SOC 2 audit can legitimately drive the roadmap. Under IRM, the audit is something you satisfy because risk analysis said the underlying controls were worth having anyway. Both arrive at similar control sets. They argue about it in a different order.
GRC engineering is a newer and more concrete shift. Traditional GRC treats evidence as something a person gathers before an audit. GRC engineering treats it as something the infrastructure emits continuously, tested the way you'd test application code. It requires engineering capacity most small teams don't have, which is why it shows up first at companies with a security engineering function and a compliance burden large enough to justify one.
What GRC covers now that it didn't five years ago
The three pillars haven't changed. What sits inside them has, in two ways, worth knowing before you scope a program against older guidance.
The first is AI governance. Models introduce obligations that don't map cleanly onto existing security controls, covering training data provenance, model behavior monitoring, and disclosure to the people affected by automated decisions. Three reference points have emerged. ISO 42001 is the certifiable management standard for AI. The NIST AI Risk Management Framework is the voluntary US guidance. The EU AI Act is binding regulation with phased obligations. If your product touches models, AI governance belongs in your program scope now rather than as a later addition, because retrofitting governance onto a shipped model is considerably harder than scoping it in.
The second is third-party risk at volume. Companies now run on SaaS estates large enough that no single person can name every vendor holding customer data. Frameworks have caught up, and SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR all expect documented vendor due diligence rather than a signed contract and good intentions. The practical consequence is that vendor review stopped being an annual procurement exercise and became continuous work that belongs to the risk pillar.
Both shifts push in the same direction. The scope of what a GRC program covers keeps widening while the headcount assigned to it generally doesn't, which is most of the reason automation moved from a nice-to-have to the default assumption.
What GRC looks like at each stage of company growth
The same three pillars mean materially different things at 30 people and 3,000. Most published guidance assumes the enterprise version, which is why founders read it and conclude GRC is something for other companies. Here's what each stage looks like in practice, and where the moves between them tend to break.
Under 50 people
The trigger is almost always external. A customer asks for SOC 2 or ISO 27001 before they'll sign, and compliance becomes a project with a deadline. Governance at this size is a handful of approved policies with a named owner, not a committee and a charter. Risk work is an informal list of known gaps, reviewed when something changes. An engineering leader usually carries all of it alongside their real job, and that's the correct answer, since hiring a dedicated compliance person at 30 people buys process you don't yet need.
50 to 200 people
The first dedicated security hire lands here, and the risk register stops being a list of concerns and starts carrying owners, scores, and treatment decisions against every entry.
This is also where the move out of spreadsheets happens. It arrives when evidence collection starts consuming named engineering hours on a recurring basis. The tell is specific. Someone on your team can tell you how many days before an audit they start pulling screenshots. Once that number is measured in weeks, the spreadsheet has stopped being cheaper than tooling, and the cost has quietly moved onto an engineering budget where nobody's tracking it.
200 to 1,000 people
A dedicated GRC function appears, usually two to five people, and governance formalizes into documented decision rights, a stated risk appetite, and reporting that reaches the board.
The defining challenge here is the move from one framework to several. Adding ISO 27001 to an existing SOC 2 program feels like it should roughly double the work. It doesn't, because the underlying controls overlap heavily. It only stays manageable if you mapped controls to requirements rather than gathering evidence per framework. Teams that skipped mapping discover this the expensive way, collecting the same access review twice because two spreadsheets asked for it separately.
1,000 people and up
Governance segments. Business units and geographies get their own policies, owners, and sometimes their own regulators, while leadership still needs one consolidated view across all of them. Risk work shifts from listing risks to mapping them against assets and business impact, because a board asking what a given risk costs won't accept a severity score as an answer. Vendor review runs continuously rather than annually, and the GRC team specializes by domain instead of by task.
GRC roles and responsibilities
GRC requires cross-department collaboration, which exposes organizations to the risks of duplicative work and unclear responsibilities. To avoid these issues, ensure everyone is on the same page and clearly understands how they can contribute to an effective GRC program.
If you need a reference point, the table below explains the typical responsibilities of different teams and departments:
While you’ll have a dedicated person or team in charge of GRC implementation, the ownership shouldn't rest with a single role. Ensuring compliance and overseeing the program’s success requires a collective effort, so ensure accountability across organizational levels.
{{cta_withimage24="/cta-blocks"}} | How to choose the right continuous compliance solution
Benefits of an effective GRC program
In organizations with less mature security programs, it’s common for governance, risk management, and compliance to be managed separately. While this may work in the short term, it can result in piecemeal tasks and siloed projects, teams, and tools in the long run.
As an organization grows and matures, so should its security program, and that means taking a structured approach to GRC. The benefits of GRC compound once governance, risk, and compliance run as one program instead of three. The benefits of such an approach include:
- Improved efficiency: With a structured GRC strategy, you can plan your team’s resources effectively and integrate compliance and risk management tasks into their day-to-day workflows. This prevents security tasks from falling through the cracks and ensures teams aren’t duplicating efforts.
- Ongoing compliance: Gaps in compliance could lead to legal fines, loss of business, and other costly consequences. With a GRC approach, compliance is integrated into your teams’ workflows, ensuring continuous compliance and helping your organization avoid potential gaps.
- Enhanced visibility: A well-implemented GRC program with robust tools offers increased transparency to stakeholders and gives employees, customers, partners, and auditors better visibility into your GRC practices.
- Stronger security posture: Risk management is only effective if it’s implemented strategically. With a GRC program, risk management is set up with continuous processes to ensure that you’re managing risk appropriately and quickly.
5 steps to implementing a successful GRC program
You can build and execute an elaborate GRC program by following these steps:
Step 1: Understand the GRC Capability Model
The GRC Capability Model is a comprehensive set of guidelines organizations can use to develop and implement a GRC framework. It outlines the key policies and practices related to communication, training, and other important aspects of GRC implementation.
The GRC model consists of four elements:
- Learn: Understand the context of your organization, its stakeholders, culture, and key industry expectations
- Align: Develop effective controls for aligning business objectives with the long-term strategy and monitoring your progress toward achieving them
- Perform: Implement your policies and controls, and take a proactive approach to addressing both emerging opportunities and potential challenges
- Review: Monitor and reassess all your GRC activities to identify areas of improvement
Step 2: Assess your GRC objectives
If you’ve already conducted any GRC activities (e.g., risk assessments or internal compliance audits), compare them to the industry-accepted practices to identify gaps and define your GRC goals. There are no universal objectives to adopt—you must define yours through activities such as:
- Compliance audits
- Security reviews
- Risk assessments
The above processes should be conducted against specific reference points, which are typically regulations and security standards that industry leaders follow, such as:
- ISO 27001
- HIPAA
- SOC 2
After performing the necessary activities, you can identify gaps that will inform your GRC framework.
Step 3: Choose the right GRC tools
Your chosen GRC software can make or break the program’s effectiveness and everyday workflows. There are many options to consider, so research which solution best aligns with your objectives, IT infrastructure, and compliance requirements.
Regardless of these factors, the key features to look for in your GRC solution include:
- Workflow automation
- Centralized documentation
- Risk management features
- Continuous monitoring and reporting
You might not find a single platform that checks all the necessary boxes and offers complete GRC automation, so you might adopt several solutions. In this case, make sure they come with extensive integrations that let you create a cohesive environment.
Step 4: Build a GRC framework
After defining your GRC objectives, use them to develop a corresponding GRC framework that will help you achieve them. The key components of the framework include:
- Program scope: Outline your key IT assets, policies, and procedures to scope the GRC program precisely
- Process and tool integration: Bring processes and software together to develop streamlined GRC workflows
- Key roles and responsibilities: Assign responsibilities for different GRC processes and make sure all team members understand them
- Milestones and KPIs: To understand how effective your organization’s GRC program is, measure the length of audit engagement (in hours), the number of findings in audit engagements over time, and the time required to remediate findings
During the framework planning stage, you must get all the key stakeholders and departments on board. Doing so ensures alignment and enables effective collaboration.
Step 5: Test and expand your GRC program gradually
It's not advisable to enforce your GRC program in one go—this could overwhelm your teams and cause notable operational disruptions. You’d have to overhaul your current processes, which might lead to haphazard implementation and unsatisfactory results.
To avoid this, test your program on a specific function to see how it behaves in real-life settings and identify any inefficiencies. After assessing its effectiveness and achieving the desired results, you can gradually expand it to other functions in your organization.
During the expansion, make sure to closely monitor the program’s performance. Develop effective feedback loops that allow your team to highlight and address any issues promptly as they arise.
{{cta_withimage8="/cta-blocks"}} | GRC implementation guide
How to tell whether you need a GRC program yet
Most guidance assumes the answer is yes. It isn't always. Here are the triggers that mean it's time.
- A customer or prospect asked for a certification, a completed security questionnaire, or evidence you don't currently have.
- You're pursuing a second framework, and controls are starting to duplicate across the two.
- Risk decisions are being made without any record of who made them or on what basis.
- Evidence collection is consuming named engineering time on a recurring schedule.
- A regulator or a signed contract imposed a specific obligation with a deadline attached.
- Nobody can tell you who owns a given control.
If none of those apply, you probably don't need a formal program yet, and building one early mostly produces documentation nobody maintains. Write down your handful of security decisions, name an owner for each, and revisit when the first trigger shows up. That's a defensible position at 15 people, and it's a much better starting point than an abandoned policy library.
Implement a comprehensive GRC program with Vanta
Whether you’re developing a new GRC program or optimizing an existing one, software is key, and Vanta offers a solution that streamlines program implementation and oversight.
This comprehensive GRC product replaces inefficient legacy software and manual processes with automated workflows that save your teams considerable time and effort. It reduces time spent on compliance and audits by 82% and speeds up policy writing and reviewing by 66%.
It does so through a robust set of features, including:
- Centralized risk management
- Automated evidence collection
- Streamlined control monitoring
- Revenue- and risk-informed GRC reports
- Extensive customization features
- Over 400 integrations with popular software (cloud providers, CRM systems, etc.)
The product also offers dedicated workspaces, letting you create separate workflows for individual business units and oversee them from a centralized dashboard. This makes it an excellent solution for organizations that want to mature from traditional GRC to a comprehensive EGRC program.
Schedule a custom demo of Vanta’s GRC solution to see its features live and explore its practical applications.
{{cta_simple7="/cta-blocks"}} | GRC product page
Introduction to GRC
What is GRC?
Looking to upgrade to continuous, automated GRC and get visibility across your entire program?
Keeping up with all the changes in the security and compliance landscape can be demanding. It requires a systematic approach to control implementation and monitoring and a comprehensive risk management strategy.
Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) programs enable such a holistic approach. They unify teams, processes, and IT systems under a single, organization-wide strategy aligned with the organization’s overarching business objectives.
Developing and implementing an effective GRC framework is a complex task, and this article will guide you through the process to give you a head start. We’ll cover:
- The definition and components of GRC
- Benefits of an effective GRC strategy
- GRC roles and responsibilities
- Five implementation steps to follow
What exactly is GRC?
GRC (governance, risk, compliance) is an integrated approach to the implementation and oversight of different governance, risk management, and compliance activities. The table below offers a high-level overview of its key components:
{{cta_withimage8="/cta-blocks"}}
The three get named together because they share inputs and fail together. A control exists because governance decided it should. It gets prioritized because risk work said it mattered. It gets evidenced because a framework requires proof. When those three activities live in different tools owned by different people, the same access review gets run once for the auditor, once for the risk register, and once for the policy owner, and the three records disagree by the end of the quarter.
The overlaps you see here aren’t accidental—all GRC activities must be closely related to form a unified program instead of being siloed in standalone strategies. There are several reasons for this, most notably:
- Ever-evolving cybersecurity threats: The number and complexity of cybersecurity threats increase continuously, calling for an integrated security approach that goes beyond technical controls. Your organization must comply with all the necessary security regulations and develop a culture of threat awareness at all levels.
- Frequent changes to an organization’s regulatory landscape: Your compliance posture and obligations change at all times, so you need to replace point-in-time assessments and updates with continuous monitoring to keep up and ensure ongoing compliance.
- The need for advanced data privacy and security strategies: Data security goes beyond your IT infrastructure and must also encompass people and processes. This calls for a comprehensive approach to security that combines all components of GRC.
- Complex and diverse third-party relationships: Besides managing your own risk posture, you must closely monitor your third-party network through a comprehensive risk management strategy to avoid exploited external vulnerabilities.
The three pillars of GRC
Each pillar carries its own artifacts, its own owner, and its own way of going wrong. They also depend on each other in sequence, since governance defines what you're protecting, risk management finds what threatens it, and compliance proves the result to people outside your company. Most programs get built in reverse, starting from a compliance deadline and working backward, which is workable but tends to leave the governance layer thin.
Governance
Governance is the part people skip, and skipping it is why programs stall. It answers two questions before any control gets written. What is this organization trying to protect, and how much risk will leadership accept to keep moving?
In practice that means a set of approved policies, a named owner for each one, a defined control set, and a documented statement of risk appetite. The artifacts matter less than the decision rights behind them. If nobody can tell you who approves an exception to your access policy, you have policy documents but no governance.
Risk management
Risk management identifies what could stop you from hitting those objectives, ranks it, and decides what to do about each item. The output is a risk register with owners, scores, and treatment decisions recorded against every entry.
Treatment is where most registers go quiet. Every risk gets one of four outcomes. You mitigate it with a control, transfer it through insurance or a contract, avoid it by not doing the thing, or accept it and write down who accepted it. A register full of identified risks and empty of treatment decisions is a list, not a program.
Compliance
Compliance proves adherence to specific obligations. Those come from regulation such as HIPAA or GDPR, from voluntary frameworks such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001, and from contracts your sales team signed.
The work splits into two halves that people conflate. Mapping is deciding which of your controls satisfies which requirement across every framework you're pursuing. Evidence is proving those controls operated over a defined period. Mapping is a one-time design problem that pays off permanently. Evidence is a recurring collection problem that compounds with every framework you add, which is why the second framework hurts more than the first.
How GRC compares to IRM, ERM, and GRC engineering
As we define GRC through the various activities an organization performs to operate while managing risk, we must differentiate between the levels at which these activities are conducted. In this context, we can separate traditional GRC from enterprise governance risk and compliance (EGRC).
Four terms circle the same territory, and vendors use them loosely enough that the distinctions have blurred. Here's what separates them.
The GRC and IRM distinction is mostly about which function sets priorities. Under GRC, an upcoming SOC 2 audit can legitimately drive the roadmap. Under IRM, the audit is something you satisfy because risk analysis said the underlying controls were worth having anyway. Both arrive at similar control sets. They argue about it in a different order.
GRC engineering is a newer and more concrete shift. Traditional GRC treats evidence as something a person gathers before an audit. GRC engineering treats it as something the infrastructure emits continuously, tested the way you'd test application code. It requires engineering capacity most small teams don't have, which is why it shows up first at companies with a security engineering function and a compliance burden large enough to justify one.
What GRC covers now that it didn't five years ago
The three pillars haven't changed. What sits inside them has, in two ways, worth knowing before you scope a program against older guidance.
The first is AI governance. Models introduce obligations that don't map cleanly onto existing security controls, covering training data provenance, model behavior monitoring, and disclosure to the people affected by automated decisions. Three reference points have emerged. ISO 42001 is the certifiable management standard for AI. The NIST AI Risk Management Framework is the voluntary US guidance. The EU AI Act is binding regulation with phased obligations. If your product touches models, AI governance belongs in your program scope now rather than as a later addition, because retrofitting governance onto a shipped model is considerably harder than scoping it in.
The second is third-party risk at volume. Companies now run on SaaS estates large enough that no single person can name every vendor holding customer data. Frameworks have caught up, and SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR all expect documented vendor due diligence rather than a signed contract and good intentions. The practical consequence is that vendor review stopped being an annual procurement exercise and became continuous work that belongs to the risk pillar.
Both shifts push in the same direction. The scope of what a GRC program covers keeps widening while the headcount assigned to it generally doesn't, which is most of the reason automation moved from a nice-to-have to the default assumption.
What GRC looks like at each stage of company growth
The same three pillars mean materially different things at 30 people and 3,000. Most published guidance assumes the enterprise version, which is why founders read it and conclude GRC is something for other companies. Here's what each stage looks like in practice, and where the moves between them tend to break.
Under 50 people
The trigger is almost always external. A customer asks for SOC 2 or ISO 27001 before they'll sign, and compliance becomes a project with a deadline. Governance at this size is a handful of approved policies with a named owner, not a committee and a charter. Risk work is an informal list of known gaps, reviewed when something changes. An engineering leader usually carries all of it alongside their real job, and that's the correct answer, since hiring a dedicated compliance person at 30 people buys process you don't yet need.
50 to 200 people
The first dedicated security hire lands here, and the risk register stops being a list of concerns and starts carrying owners, scores, and treatment decisions against every entry.
This is also where the move out of spreadsheets happens. It arrives when evidence collection starts consuming named engineering hours on a recurring basis. The tell is specific. Someone on your team can tell you how many days before an audit they start pulling screenshots. Once that number is measured in weeks, the spreadsheet has stopped being cheaper than tooling, and the cost has quietly moved onto an engineering budget where nobody's tracking it.
200 to 1,000 people
A dedicated GRC function appears, usually two to five people, and governance formalizes into documented decision rights, a stated risk appetite, and reporting that reaches the board.
The defining challenge here is the move from one framework to several. Adding ISO 27001 to an existing SOC 2 program feels like it should roughly double the work. It doesn't, because the underlying controls overlap heavily. It only stays manageable if you mapped controls to requirements rather than gathering evidence per framework. Teams that skipped mapping discover this the expensive way, collecting the same access review twice because two spreadsheets asked for it separately.
1,000 people and up
Governance segments. Business units and geographies get their own policies, owners, and sometimes their own regulators, while leadership still needs one consolidated view across all of them. Risk work shifts from listing risks to mapping them against assets and business impact, because a board asking what a given risk costs won't accept a severity score as an answer. Vendor review runs continuously rather than annually, and the GRC team specializes by domain instead of by task.
GRC roles and responsibilities
GRC requires cross-department collaboration, which exposes organizations to the risks of duplicative work and unclear responsibilities. To avoid these issues, ensure everyone is on the same page and clearly understands how they can contribute to an effective GRC program.
If you need a reference point, the table below explains the typical responsibilities of different teams and departments:
While you’ll have a dedicated person or team in charge of GRC implementation, the ownership shouldn't rest with a single role. Ensuring compliance and overseeing the program’s success requires a collective effort, so ensure accountability across organizational levels.
{{cta_withimage24="/cta-blocks"}} | How to choose the right continuous compliance solution
Benefits of an effective GRC program
In organizations with less mature security programs, it’s common for governance, risk management, and compliance to be managed separately. While this may work in the short term, it can result in piecemeal tasks and siloed projects, teams, and tools in the long run.
As an organization grows and matures, so should its security program, and that means taking a structured approach to GRC. The benefits of GRC compound once governance, risk, and compliance run as one program instead of three. The benefits of such an approach include:
- Improved efficiency: With a structured GRC strategy, you can plan your team’s resources effectively and integrate compliance and risk management tasks into their day-to-day workflows. This prevents security tasks from falling through the cracks and ensures teams aren’t duplicating efforts.
- Ongoing compliance: Gaps in compliance could lead to legal fines, loss of business, and other costly consequences. With a GRC approach, compliance is integrated into your teams’ workflows, ensuring continuous compliance and helping your organization avoid potential gaps.
- Enhanced visibility: A well-implemented GRC program with robust tools offers increased transparency to stakeholders and gives employees, customers, partners, and auditors better visibility into your GRC practices.
- Stronger security posture: Risk management is only effective if it’s implemented strategically. With a GRC program, risk management is set up with continuous processes to ensure that you’re managing risk appropriately and quickly.
5 steps to implementing a successful GRC program
You can build and execute an elaborate GRC program by following these steps:
Step 1: Understand the GRC Capability Model
The GRC Capability Model is a comprehensive set of guidelines organizations can use to develop and implement a GRC framework. It outlines the key policies and practices related to communication, training, and other important aspects of GRC implementation.
The GRC model consists of four elements:
- Learn: Understand the context of your organization, its stakeholders, culture, and key industry expectations
- Align: Develop effective controls for aligning business objectives with the long-term strategy and monitoring your progress toward achieving them
- Perform: Implement your policies and controls, and take a proactive approach to addressing both emerging opportunities and potential challenges
- Review: Monitor and reassess all your GRC activities to identify areas of improvement
Step 2: Assess your GRC objectives
If you’ve already conducted any GRC activities (e.g., risk assessments or internal compliance audits), compare them to the industry-accepted practices to identify gaps and define your GRC goals. There are no universal objectives to adopt—you must define yours through activities such as:
- Compliance audits
- Security reviews
- Risk assessments
The above processes should be conducted against specific reference points, which are typically regulations and security standards that industry leaders follow, such as:
- ISO 27001
- HIPAA
- SOC 2
After performing the necessary activities, you can identify gaps that will inform your GRC framework.
Step 3: Choose the right GRC tools
Your chosen GRC software can make or break the program’s effectiveness and everyday workflows. There are many options to consider, so research which solution best aligns with your objectives, IT infrastructure, and compliance requirements.
Regardless of these factors, the key features to look for in your GRC solution include:
- Workflow automation
- Centralized documentation
- Risk management features
- Continuous monitoring and reporting
You might not find a single platform that checks all the necessary boxes and offers complete GRC automation, so you might adopt several solutions. In this case, make sure they come with extensive integrations that let you create a cohesive environment.
Step 4: Build a GRC framework
After defining your GRC objectives, use them to develop a corresponding GRC framework that will help you achieve them. The key components of the framework include:
- Program scope: Outline your key IT assets, policies, and procedures to scope the GRC program precisely
- Process and tool integration: Bring processes and software together to develop streamlined GRC workflows
- Key roles and responsibilities: Assign responsibilities for different GRC processes and make sure all team members understand them
- Milestones and KPIs: To understand how effective your organization’s GRC program is, measure the length of audit engagement (in hours), the number of findings in audit engagements over time, and the time required to remediate findings
During the framework planning stage, you must get all the key stakeholders and departments on board. Doing so ensures alignment and enables effective collaboration.
Step 5: Test and expand your GRC program gradually
It's not advisable to enforce your GRC program in one go—this could overwhelm your teams and cause notable operational disruptions. You’d have to overhaul your current processes, which might lead to haphazard implementation and unsatisfactory results.
To avoid this, test your program on a specific function to see how it behaves in real-life settings and identify any inefficiencies. After assessing its effectiveness and achieving the desired results, you can gradually expand it to other functions in your organization.
During the expansion, make sure to closely monitor the program’s performance. Develop effective feedback loops that allow your team to highlight and address any issues promptly as they arise.
{{cta_withimage8="/cta-blocks"}} | GRC implementation guide
How to tell whether you need a GRC program yet
Most guidance assumes the answer is yes. It isn't always. Here are the triggers that mean it's time.
- A customer or prospect asked for a certification, a completed security questionnaire, or evidence you don't currently have.
- You're pursuing a second framework, and controls are starting to duplicate across the two.
- Risk decisions are being made without any record of who made them or on what basis.
- Evidence collection is consuming named engineering time on a recurring schedule.
- A regulator or a signed contract imposed a specific obligation with a deadline attached.
- Nobody can tell you who owns a given control.
If none of those apply, you probably don't need a formal program yet, and building one early mostly produces documentation nobody maintains. Write down your handful of security decisions, name an owner for each, and revisit when the first trigger shows up. That's a defensible position at 15 people, and it's a much better starting point than an abandoned policy library.
Implement a comprehensive GRC program with Vanta
Whether you’re developing a new GRC program or optimizing an existing one, software is key, and Vanta offers a solution that streamlines program implementation and oversight.
This comprehensive GRC product replaces inefficient legacy software and manual processes with automated workflows that save your teams considerable time and effort. It reduces time spent on compliance and audits by 82% and speeds up policy writing and reviewing by 66%.
It does so through a robust set of features, including:
- Centralized risk management
- Automated evidence collection
- Streamlined control monitoring
- Revenue- and risk-informed GRC reports
- Extensive customization features
- Over 400 integrations with popular software (cloud providers, CRM systems, etc.)
The product also offers dedicated workspaces, letting you create separate workflows for individual business units and oversee them from a centralized dashboard. This makes it an excellent solution for organizations that want to mature from traditional GRC to a comprehensive EGRC program.
Schedule a custom demo of Vanta’s GRC solution to see its features live and explore its practical applications.
{{cta_simple7="/cta-blocks"}} | GRC 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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