Benefits of GRC – Why Siloed Approach No Longer Works

Scaling a business feels like navigating a maze. Increasing regulatory scrutiny, audit fatigue, third-party diligence, poorly designed workflows, and rapidly advancing technologies have forced businesses to constantly firefight as challenges get thrown their way. 

Without a map, navigating the business maze is confusing and complex, capable of overwhelming even the most seasoned folk. One wrong turn opens the door to unprecedented risks, operational uncertainties, and decision disparities. And before you know it, everything spirals into chaos, and you lose every semblance of control. 

A GRC framework brings order to the chaos and helps you piece the puzzle together to make sense of everything. But how does that work? This article explores the benefits of GRC based on real-life applications. 

Six benefits of GRC in the modern landscape

Some of the key benefits of a GRC framework include improved performance, higher transparency and accountability, saving costs, streamlining risk management, and improving the security posture. Let’s break them down further: 

1. Principled performance

The GRC approach gained popularity due to the increasing number of complexities introduced by traditional siloed systems, which fail to scale effectively in the long run. 

Siloed systems are fragmented departments within an organization that function somewhat independently, with each function having limited knowledge or access to other groups. This results in poor coordination, misalignment with project goals, lack of insights into risks, effort duplication, audit fatigue, and a host of other problems. 

GRC solves these challenges using the approach of ‘principled performance’, a concept that drives businesses to shift their culture from a disconnected and uncertain reality to a cohesive and thoughtfully connected one. 

Principled performance helps to ensure that all the moving parts of risk, processes, and compliance move in harmony without breaking things. 

2. Transparency and accountability

Every business structure is comprised of roles and responsibilities. While responsibility and accountability are often used interchangeably, the implications of these terms are far from the same; responsibility does not necessarily equal accountability. 

As GRC breaks siloed approaches, the result is better communication and collaboration. For example, in a non-GRC setup, a sales team may not communicate with marketing to contact a prospect. 

In a GRC-based business setup, cross-functional collaboration takes the driver’s seat, adding transparency to existing and new initiatives. This allows departments to work towards the same goal without leaving out the critical bits of information. 

3. Cost optimization

Traditional and semi-manual work structures are generally clustered. Because tools, policies, compliance, and systems are disconnected, they don’t function optimally. 

A disconnected setup is not just a barrier to information flow, it is a cost concern. When you deploy multiple systems and tools towards a single problem, you burn through the budget faster. 

Let’s understand this with a regulatory compliance obligation. If a security framework is compulsory for your business, it involves lengthy preparation and work for audit. There are two ways to approach compliance management. 

The first way involves combining semi-manual tools like Excel sheets, calculators, vulnerability tools, antivirus systems, training solutions, writing policies from scratch, and hiring external consultants. Usually, someone from the IT team is appointed to oversee the processes, resulting in a significant loss of bandwidth and cost to reach audit readiness. 

The second and better way is using automated GRC tools which consolidate processes, monitoring tools, vulnerability scanners, evidence collection, and expert recommendations in one place. This approach helps to reach audit readiness faster at a fraction of the cost and time.

GRC tools like Sprinto offers pre-built editable templates, continuously monitors your security controls against a framework, a fully scalable architecture, and scope out security risks across your business’s assets. See Sprinto in action.

4. Integrated risk management

Risks have three components: people, processes, and tools. The risk equation is quite straightforward—the number of risk components added to the infrastructure is directly proportional to vulnerabilities. 

The traditional approach to risk management has largely been reactive, a method where teams respond to incidents after they have already happened. While this works in the short term for small businesses with simpler infrastructure, the risk posture takes a hit as the volume and complexity of operations increase. 

Moreover, siloed systems introduce gaps that don’t fall within the scope of a function. These blind spots between silos go unnoticed till they trigger an incident. 

Risk management in GRC solves this by removing any blind spots, merging siloed systems, improving data, and eliminating the lack of interconnections between risks. In other words, you manage risks proactively rather than reactively.

5. Streamline security and compliance management

Much like risks, security comprises of tools, processes, and people. In siloed business setups, these are somewhat disconnected, resulting in poor visibility, which causes engineering teams and system administrators to overlook critical aspects and make wrong decisions. 

A GRC platform continuously monitors the posture against the requirements of data security and privacy frameworks. 

For example, if a business wants to be ISO 27001 certified, balancing the security components is necessary to reach audit readiness. Let’s understand how the components align against its control requirements and where GRC comes in. 

• The people component maps to requirements like security training, remote working, and event reporting (control A 6.1 to 6.8)
• The process component maps to requirements like infosec policies, management roles, and access control (control A 5.1 to 5.37)
• The technology component maps to requirements like endpoint device management, malware protection, and data masking (control A 8.1 to 8.34)

A GRC-backed cybersecurity framework synchronizes and harmonizes security and compliance objectives with business goals. If any of these controls are not functioning correctly, IT teams will be notified to take action before the situation escalates to a risk of audit failure.

6. Operational efficiency and consistency 

One of the pitfalls of non-automated and siloed systems involves managing time-consuming, repetitive, and manual processes and workflows across functions. Combine this with limited insights into management intra-functional management charts, you end up with stakeholder misalignments and a disconnected reality. 

GRC equips you with vital context and insight into the complete picture of every aspect— security risks, vulnerabilities, compliance failures, the effectiveness of controls, and a dashboard to track GRC metrics. 

A holistic view of projects, roadblocks, and hierarchies is critical to understanding the challenges and moving parts in a granular manner. GRC tools help management cut through these challenges by improving data quality, which helps to generate accurate reports. These features aid in boosing productivity and making better decisions.

Automation is changing the way you approach GRC

In a compliance and risk-heavy landscape, automation is key to drive efficiency, accountability, and transparency.

Advanced GRC automation solutions help businesses develop, launch, and run a custom program aligned with objectives specific to their organizational goals. 

Here’s how GRC automation like Sprinto can help your business navigate the maze of uncertainties and drive value:

• Launch multiple compliance programs with granular control and view progress, non-compliance activities from a 360-degree view of your overall posture
• Align security controls with business requirements and capabilities. The magic mapping feature automatically maps your framework’s custom checks to the appropriate controls.
• Assess risks using industry benchmarks to score them, use a pre-built risk library to build a register, and add custom risks as you grow
• Link risks to the right preventative controls to reduce impact, minimize residual risks, and prevent failures. Generate detailed summaries of all risks against selected frameworks like ISO 27001 or NIST
• Access a comprehensive suite of compliance tools that eliminate silos and negate the need for additional resources. Adaptive automation capabilities ensure you meet evolving requirements.

“When it comes to the GRC space, several elements are interrelated. For example, threats exploit vulnerabilities of assets that enable business operations – if these are infringed, we have risks that materialize into incidents.

While these things are easier to manage in small organizations, large companies have silos and so spreadsheets don’t work eventually. You need the right GRC tools.” – Aron Lange, with Sprinto.

Unlike traditional GRC tools, which are complex to configure and customize, Sprinto offers expert-guided, time-bound, and structured sessions for seamless implementation. Talk to our experts to learn how we can help you. 

FAQs

What are the best GRC tools for small to medium sized businesses?

Some of the best GRC software solutions for small to medium sized businesses are Sprinto, AuditBoard, Workiva, Hyperproof, Vanta, and Secureframe. These help you identify potential risks based on compliance requirements and business objectives using a structured approach. Apart from small business, GRC is also useful for enterprise risk management processes. 

What is the role of GRC in security?

GRC helps security teams develop policies, meet regulatory requirements, streamline audit management, proactively monitor their risk environment, streamline compliance efforts, gain visibility into risks, satisfy key stakeholders, improve reporting capabilities, and boost compliance posture. This proactive approach to managing cyber threats helps to improve trust with stakeholders and simplifies resource management.  

How does GRC help compliance teams?

GRC framework helps teams streamline their compliance processes through continuous monitoring of controls, detection of cybersecurity threats, helping senior management make strategic decisions, conduct internal audits, and improve overall business performance.  

How does GRC help risk teams?

GRC modules provide comprehensive insights into the entire organization’s business risk profile, conduct risk assessments, ensure business continuity by identifying cyber risks, and identify lapses in internal controls to ensure compliance with laws and government regulations.