As the global business landscape evolves, and operations adapt, it’s critical to overhauling your GRC environment in tandem. But recent reports suggest that over half of senior-level executives perceive risk and compliance as a top challenge for the next few years. Further, 69% agree that their existing policies and practices aren’t geared to meet future needs – especially as organizations’ regulatory burden increases across the 2020s. This is why it is so important to embrace GRC automation as a business staple, bringing much-needed efficiency into governance, risk, and compliance-related activities.
Critical Trends on the Horizon
Several global trends make GRC a vital area for transformation
- Easing out of regulatory pressures: Regulators are easing out reporting pressures amidst the COVID-19 crisis to drive adaptability, foster survival in current ambiguous market conditions.
- Increase in vendor and third-party risk exposures: Several firms are facing tremendous pressures in the COVID-19 phase due to their exposures to vendor-related risks, including cybersecurity, business continuity, and enterprise audit-related risks.
- Rapid growth often leads to data generation and hosting in silos, where each business unit follows a disparate set of GRC practices. There could be a lack of centralized visibility, compounding the risks arising from regulatory oversight. GRC control testing must become more agile – backed by the centralization of data – to keep up.
As the pace of business transformation picks up, we could expect GRC thresholds to be even more critical to enterprise operations. But teams are often not working at scale with this demand. With the rise of lean staffing, a select group of experts is allocated to perform a variety of tasks – and testing GRC controls take up a lot of these precious working hours.
The Cost of Legacy Processes across the GRC Value Chain
Traditionally, GRC was managed as a set of interrelated but disparate processes. There were teams dedicated to conducting audits, managing internal policies, looking after compliance, detecting risk & resolving incidents, and ensuring information security. For all of these processes, the same data would be replicated without a single pane of truth, leading to time and effort duplication.
This cost of effort-intensive GRC is three-fold:
(i) High-value personnel is relegated to doing low-value tasks (like checking if an established control works for different scenarios or compiling tedious documentation).
(ii) This trend could bring down the morale and motivation levels of the IT team, impacting its efficiency.
(iii) As audit requirements get extensive, the time and cost required will shoot up.
(i) High-value personnel is relegated to doing low-value tasks (like checking if an established control works for different scenarios or compiling tedious documentation).
(ii) This trend could bring down the morale and motivation levels of the IT team, impacting its efficiency.
(iii) As audit requirements get extensive, the time and cost required will shoot up.
As an organization scales and becomes progressively more mature, its GRC burden across vendor management, business continuity, and policy/documentation management also multiply – adding to your costs.
Ultimately, this distracts from larger, more value-adding initiatives like providing support for new business models or exploring new geographies for outreach. To shift themselves from this myopic way of doing things is why companies are now turning to sophisticated GRC tools that could alleviate the human burden, with zero compromises on compliance.
