Beyond the compliance checklist: Risk-driven cyber GRC

Compliance frameworks provide a necessary foundation for cyber risk management. But simply adhering to a checklist for audit purposes won't equip your team to manage risk in a way that truly fuels business growth.

Not all risks carry the same weight, so a standardized checklist can, at times, create a false sense of confidence. Just because you have some controls in place does not necessarily mean they're the right ones or working the way you need them to. A framework-driven checklist approach also only provides a snapshot of a point in time, which doesn’t account for the rapidly evolving nature of risks, nor does it deliver the specificity needed to pinpoint the right focus areas or the level of risk each carries.

The good news is that audit, risk, and compliance professionals can move beyond this mentality to thoughtfully tailor GRC programs to their organization's specific risk exposure. This approach ensures alignment with business strategy and the ability to proactively adapt as threats evolve.

Defining framework-driven compliance

Framework-driven means selecting a framework or standard and leveraging it as the set of requirements for your security program. It’s almost like a prepackaged checklist of things to do to build the foundational blocks of your security program. Framework-driven compliance is generally the norm for two reasons: 1) initially, many of these frameworks were developed to address the most common risks in the first place; and 2) it’s an efficient way to bypass repeated due diligence to determine what the most commonly experienced risks are across most organizations.

So, if you're in a highly regulated industry, need to meet various audits, or have multiple customers or external stakeholders reviewing attestations or certifications about your program, framework-driven compliance helps reduce the burden of hundreds of requirements you would otherwise have to comply with one at a time.

Establishing what a risk-driven approach to cyber GRC looks like

This is where a risk-driven cyber program comes in handy.

Think of a risk-driven program as offering a translation layer between business leaders’ risk concerns and the controls GRC builds for them. Because this approach brings each department closer to GRC, it can help get the wider company on board with compliance by enabling them to identify with confidence which risks matter most, which to address first, and which can wait. Ensuring a risk-driven approach from the beginning can solve many issues down the road.

A risk-driven program allows you to ask:

• What are those most significant risks?
• Where are those risks?
• What have we put in place to mitigate those risks and move forward there?
• Are we actually controlling for those risks in the environments we operate in, or are we only implementing this control in one area?
• What areas do we have gaps in?
• What controls are not operating effectively?

Once you start asking these questions, GRC can become a very strategic program in the company, enabling compliance professionals to pressure-test whether their controls are controlling for the things the business actually cares most about.

Shifting the perception of compliance

One of the most significant indicators of success in any GRC role is when teams involve these professionals early in their risk conversations—not after decisions are made or at the 11th hour. That’s when GRC becomes more of a business enabler or partner than a compliance checkpoint.

One of the first steps along this path is to have champions within each department who understand the business and the value of GRC, helping surface risks sooner rather than later. This begins by building relationships with these business partners early to understand their business units, goals, core customers, and what is critical to them. Ultimately, risks will materialize around business goals, and so understanding those is table stakes. Showing up as a partner who's there to help ensure each business unit’s risks are visible and their controls are durable really resonates.

Another step is to provide shared visibility into intake tools so GRC can see which concerns are coming in and track them across different departments. This serves to build a solid foundation for co-designing with other departments on how to work together to identify their critical risks. From the compliance side, risk and controls are distinct and often originate in different programs that eventually converge on the control side. If a department must get a product to market and secure a SOC-2 certification, for instance, GRC can educate and train them on the controls required to address the risks in their product.

At the end of the day, risk-driven cyber GRC success is each business unit owning its risks and controls, with compliance there as its advisor and key partner. Mapping this out across functions starts to give an understanding of the scale needed, the certifications and customers most important to the business, and the top risks materializing across those functions.