In Brief
Managing GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) effectively is essential to your business’s long-term success. But don’t just check compliance boxes—build a GRC program that’s embedded into the DNA of your business. This not only strengthens your security posture but also provides long-term benefits, such as easier audits, stronger customer trust, and the ability to demonstrate security readiness to your board and stakeholders.
Sections
GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) Defined
Procedures and Documentation That Work in Practice
Risk-Based Thinking: Proactively Managing Threats
Leveraging Frameworks for Better GRC
Building a High Performing GRC Team
Simplifying GRC With Automation
Don’t Over-Rely on Automation: The Human Factor of GRC
Achieving Stronger GRC Management with Seiso
GRC Isn’t Just a Check-the-Box Exercise
Cybersecurity governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) might seem like a set of check-the-box requirements at first glance, but it’s much more than that. In fact, it’s a strategic framework that can help protect your business, align your security initiatives with operational goals, and give you the confidence to face both current and future threats.
Your GRC strategy should minimize complexity while maximizing assurance, ensuring your business operates efficiently. At the same time, it should make it straightforward to demonstrate your security practices to regulators, customers, and your board, giving them confidence in your compliance and risk management.
“You want to ensure accountability, demonstrating that actions were taken, and decisions were made deliberately, but in the simplest and most efficient way possible,” says Emily Smith, GRC Engineer at Seiso.
This balance of simplicity and thoroughness is critical in managing GRC effectively.
When GRC is managed well, it becomes an enabler, not a burden. You’re not just safeguarding your data and systems—you’re also enhancing business resilience, improving efficiency, and increasing trust with your stakeholders. Done right, GRC helps you avoid surprises and unplanned work, allowing your team to focus on driving the business forward, not just reacting to risks.
This approach removes complexity from GRC, ensuring that your governance policies are clear, your risk assessments are actionable, and your compliance processes are streamlined.
The benefit to your company?
Less time spent worrying about meeting regulatory requirements and more time building a secure, resilient organization.
GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) Defined
GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) is a strategy and structure to align your operations and technology with business objectives, to manage risk effectively, and meet regulatory requirements. The three components of GRC are:
- Governance: Establishing policies and procedures to ensure that business activities align with organizational goals and legal regulatory requirements.
- Risk Management: Identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks that could negatively impact the organization’s operations or reputation.
- Compliance: Ensuring the organization adheres to relevant laws, regulations, standards, best practices and internal policies to avoid penalties and maintain credibility.
A well-planned GRC approach offers several benefits, including improved decision making, optimized IT and human resources allocations, enhanced operational efficiency and a more resilient risk management posture.
Procedures and Documentation That Work in Practice
Effective GRC needs well-defined procedures and documentation, which becomes your guiding roadmap for the overall cybersecurity program. But it’s not enough to just have the documentation. As auditors and customers will ask, “How do you know you’re actually following this procedure?”
These documents should be practical tools that reflect what happens in your organization. By making sure procedures are actionable and aligned with real-world practices, you can confidently show auditors, regulators, or customers that you’re not only meeting compliance requirements but continuously improving. This approach allows you to demonstrate adaptability and resilience when faced with new cyber threats or regulatory challenges.
Risk-Based Thinking: Proactively Managing Threats
Effective GRC isn’t about reacting to every potential threat; it’s about managing risk in a way that protects your business without exhausting resources. A risk-based approach prioritizes the threats most likely to impact your organization. This allows you to direct resources where they’re needed most and avoid the costly mistake of overcommitting to unlikely risks. By focusing on the highest priorities, you safeguard your business efficiently and avoid spreading your team too thin.
This strategic prioritization helps allocate resources efficiently and strengthen overall security. But remember, no system is flawless and unexpected issues can arise. It’s important to build the capability to anticipate both known and unknown threats.
When thinking about risks, it’s crucial to score threats by likelihood and impact, says Emily Smith, Seiso’s GRC Engineer. “As GRC professionals, our role is to anticipate what could go wrong and prepare for it—striving for the best outcomes, while preparing for the worst,” she says.
This proactive, risk-based mindset extends beyond the immediate threats. Security programs should be built to evolve over time, ensuring that as new risks emerge, your organization is ready. By eliminating surprises, your team can focus on strategic governance, risk management and compliance, rather than constantly putting out fires.
Leveraging Frameworks for Better GRC
Establishing a strong GRC framework doesn’t mean starting from scratch. Leverage established frameworks like ISO 27001, NIST 800-53, and CMMC to give your organization a structured approach to managing governance, risk, and compliance. These frameworks provide a comprehensive set of guidelines, helping you meet regulatory requirements while ensuring your security measures are aligned with industry best practices.
Working within these frameworks ensures that your security posture is built on proven standards, which not only simplifies compliance but also makes your organization more resilient.
However, simply adopting a framework isn’t enough – It needs to be tailored to fit your specific business needs. The key is to map your operations to the right framework, ensuring that the controls and policies implemented are not just regulatory checkmarks but meaningful tools for managing risk and driving business performance.
A well-tailored GRC framework strengthens your security posture, makes audits easier, builds customer trust, and allows you to demonstrate security readiness to your board and stakeholders, all while supporting long-term business goals.
But as always, emphasize balance, advises Eric Lansbery – Seiso Principal Engineer & COO. “Automation should be part of any organization’s strategic plan. While some manual processes will always be there, reducing toil and repeated manual work by incorporating automation is the only way to manage ongoing compliance,” he says.
Building a High Performing GRC Team
Now that we’ve covered the principles of GRC, let’s talk about who will manage it. A well-rounded GRC team should have diverse skills and expertise in overall governance, risk management, compliance, as well as IT and cybersecurity.
Here are some general tips for building a GRC team for top performance.
- Define clear roles and responsibilities. Ensure that each team member has clearly defined roles, from governance oversight to operational risk management. This prevents overlap, reduces inefficiencies, and ensures all critical areas of GRC are covered.
- Encourage cross-functional collaboration. A successful GRC team works closely with IT, legal, finance, and other departments to eliminate silos and integrate GRC practices across the entire organization.
- Invest in continual training and development. The regulatory landscape and risk environment are constantly evolving. Invest in continuous education and training for your GRC team to keep them updated on new regulations, threats, and best practices.
- Automate GRC functions where you can. Integrating compliance automation tools is crucial for streamlining workflows and allowing the team to focus on higher-value tasks. Automation tools can track compliance status in real-time, manage risk continuously, and provide detailed reporting for audits.
Leverage third-party risk management expertise. Ensure your GRC team includes specialists who can assess and manage third-party risks, especially given the increased reliance on external vendors. A robust third-party risk management strategy is key to protecting your organization from external vulnerabilities. This is a great example of how a cybersecurity provider with GRC expertise (like Seiso) can add value.
Simplifying GRC With Automation
Integrating compliance automation tools is essential for streamlining workflows and allowing the team to focus on higher-value tasks. Automation tools can track compliance status in real-time, manage risk continuously, and provide detailed reporting for audits.
Using continuous compliance tools like Drata or Vanta, Seiso makes it easier to stay audit ready. These tools automate much of the compliance work, ensuring that your organization meets the necessary requirements with minimal manual effort.
Map out all the repetitive, low-value, and well-understood GRC tasks and put them into automation, advises Seiso GRC expert Emily Smith. “Once you are able to turn a task into a procedure, document it, and then work on automating it,” she says.
Of course, not everything can be automated. Some procedures remain manual because they’re complex or unique to your organization. That’s why it pays to take a balanced approach—automating where it makes sense, while ensuring the remaining manual processes are well-documented and actionable. This prevents your team from being bogged down by endless, outdated procedures.
Don’t Over-Rely on Automation: The Human Factor of GRC
While automation plays a critical role in modern GRC management, it’s important to remember that tools alone aren’t enough to fully protect your business. No matter how advanced the technology, there’s always a need for human oversight and critical thinking.
Continue compliance tools such as Drata or Vanta can streamline security processes, but they can’t fully replace the human expertise needed for accurate risk assessment, incident response, and threat prioritization. Over-reliance on automation can lead to alert fatigue, misclassifying vulnerabilities, or generating excessive false positives.
Without skilled professionals to fine-tune configurations and apply context to alerts, your team risks overlooking genuine threats or allocating resources inefficiently. Human oversight ensures that automated alerts are evaluated against real-world experience and organizational priorities.
At Seiso, we advocate an approach that integrates the best of both worlds: leveraging technology to increase efficiency while ensuring human experts remain deeply involved in your GRC efforts. The result is a layered security strategy, blending automation with human decision-making to reduce risks while maintaining a proactive security posture.
While automation is a powerful tool in the GRC toolkit, it’s the people behind the processes who ensure your organization remains secure and resilient.
Build a Culture of Compliance Through Training and Awareness
Effective GRC doesn’t stop with tools and policies. For it to truly be successful, compliance must be ingrained in your company culture. Everyone in your organization has a role to play in maintaining security, not just the IT department.
You don’t want security to be seen as a burden, says Emily Smith. “You want the organization to want to help and understand that security is everyone’s responsibility,”
When compliance is seen as a shared goal, rather than an isolated duty of the IT team, your organization becomes more resilient and proactive in preventing security issues.
Building this culture of compliance can start with providing comprehensive training programs and raising security awareness throughout the company, from top leadership to front-line employees. Measure success by everyone knowing how their actions impact the company’s risk posture and following GRC policies and procedures.
These programs should include practical steps that individuals can take to support GRC efforts, such as following proper procedures, reporting suspicious activity, and maintaining good cyber hygiene.
As an additional layer of defense, strive to eliminate single points of failure within teams. For instance, having only one person knowing how to handle a critical process or how to address incidents is a single point of failure. Proactive cross-training and knowledge sharing across teams and with new employees will go a long way toward preventing situations where the absence of a key individual could jeopardize your security or compliance posture.
This human-centered approach also extends to third-party risk management, ensuring that external partners and vendors are aligned with your security standards. Build clear policies for managing third-party risks, making sure that vendors don’t become the weakest link in your security chain.
Ultimately, building a culture of compliance strengthens your GRC program by engaging your entire organization in the effort to manage risk. With the right investments in security awareness and training, your team will be equipped to not only follow best practices but actively contribute to maintaining a secure and compliant business environment.
Achieving Stronger GRC Management with Seiso
At Seiso, we know that effective GRC management isn’t just about satisfying auditors. It’s about proactively embedding security into the very fabric of your organization—without creating friction. Our goal is to not only help you meet compliance requirements but also to enable your business to thrive by embedding GRC into your everyday operations.
We help businesses build GRC frameworks that not only meet compliance standards but also support long-term growth, increase operational efficiency, and instill confidence among stakeholders. Our approach is designed to simplify GRC, helping you achieve a stronger security posture without adding unnecessary complexity or burden.
Our approach typically starts by conducting a thorough risk assessment, mapping out potential threats and vulnerabilities, and building a risk register tailored to your organization. We help you understand which risks require immediate action, which can be mitigated over time, and which can be accepted. This approach keeps you focused on the real dangers while avoiding unnecessary distractions.
“We’re not just here to solve today’s problem. We’re here to ensure you’re prepared for what’s coming next, so there are no surprises,” says Joe Wynn, Seiso CEO. Seiso’s goal is to eliminate unnecessary work and friction, giving you the peace of mind that your GRC program works well and is built to last.
In addition to building a solid foundation for compliance, Seiso focuses on optimizing your processes through automation. Using tools like Drata and Vanta, we help automate your compliance tracking, ensuring you stay audit-ready with minimal manual effort.
Seiso GRC teams work as an extension of your security organization, providing the expertise needed to fill gaps and strengthen your overall GRC capabilities. Whether you’re preparing for an audit, managing compliance with multiple frameworks, or improving your risk management processes, Seiso offers hands-on guidance at every step.
By focusing on continuous improvement, we help you stay ahead of emerging threats, ensure long-term resilience, and build trust with your customers, board, and regulators.
When you work with Seiso, GRC becomes a streamlined, manageable process that not only protects your organization but also unlocks new opportunities for growth. You’ll have the assurance that your security program is aligned with your business goals, allowing you to focus on what matters most—running and scaling your business with confidence.
