Key Considerations for Choosing the Right GRC Platform

Assessing Your Needs and Making Informed Decisions

Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) are becoming increasingly complex as global security and privacy regulations evolve, threat vectors multiply, vulnerabilities increase, and cyber risks surge.

These factors, coupled with a severe GRC talent shortage of approximately 3.2 million security professionals, mean many companies need help with compliance and risk management.

As you look for a GRC platform to fit your business, ensure that you take into consideration the following five concerns:

1. The size and complexity of your organization: As your organization expands and diversifies its operations, manually managing risks and compliance becomes increasingly challenging, cumbersome, and open to error. If your company’s risk management and compliance processes are manual and uncoordinated, your teams face duplication of efforts, inefficiencies, and a high risk of error.
   • How RiskOptics helps: The RiskOptics ROAR Platform streamlines and automates workflows, improves collaboration, and reduces the risk of errors or oversight. Through its use of optics, ROAR can also help you more easily see and understand the risk posture of key business areas, such as business units or products. As a cloud-native application with controls and evidence that can be reused across the platform, it is quick and easy to scale it up or down to meet your organization’s demand, seamlessly grow with the business, and ensure optimal operations. With a unified view of risk and compliance in the context of your business, you can make better, risk-informed strategic business decisions.
2. Your organization’s specific risk and compliance requirements: Compliance regulations are becoming more complex, privacy requirements are increasing, and globally expanding businesses must meet more and more standards. Organizations need help to keep up.
   • How RiskOptics helps: If your industry is heavily regulated or your company operates in multiple jurisdictions, the ROAR Platform can help you streamline compliance processes, ease complexity, track regulatory changes, and ensure adherence to applicable laws and regulations. It can help to identify all of the internal and external threats the organization faces, as well as surface hidden risks, help assess the likelihood and impact of these risks, and address your unique challenges and geographical reach concerns.
3. The cost of the solution and its benefits: Consider your current manual processes’ dollar and time costs and how they affect your teams’ productivity. For example, manually collecting evidence, assessing controls, and preparing for audits take time and a lot of effort, while using spreadsheets or multiple systems creates inefficiencies and a large and unnecessary dollar cost.
   • How RiskOptics helps: By mapping compliance controls to cyber risks, automating the evidence collection process, continuously testing controls, and automating many of your manual GRC tasks, RiskOptic’s ROAR Platform provides real-time visibility into where risk is highest. Prioritize work, free up your team, centralize your systems to trim legacy GRC subscription and maintenance costs, and eliminate hours spent preparing for audits or adjusting risk scores.
4. How the platform will benefit your business: It is important to consider the specific benefits you seek in a GRC platform. If you need a platform that can help you manage a wide range of risks and compliance requirements and easily surface areas of high risk across your organization, then you will need a platform with a comprehensive set of features or the ability to add additional features.
   • How RiskOptics helps: The RiskOpticsROAR Platform seamlessly unifies risk, cybersecurity, and compliance in the context of your business goals delivering a single, real-time view of risk in a business context. Whether you must pass your first audit or expand your third-party risk efforts, you can easily grow and scale as your risk program matures.
5. The ease of use of a GRC platform: This is important for two reasons. If the platform is too complex or difficult to use, employees may not be willing to use it. We hear stories of new security applications not being used or not delivering the expected value because they were too complex. Second, the platform’s ease of use can affect your GRC processes. Overly complex platform workflows mean users spend more time checking boxes rather than reducing risk.
   • How RiskOptics helps: The ROAR Platform makes GRC easy to use for everyone with built-in expert content, automatically built relationships between threats, vulnerabilities, risks, and controls, and expert-scored risk and threat registers that can then be tailored to your organization. With automated workflows, automated compliance, and real-time risk scoring, the ROAR Platform provides compliance and risk teams with the know-how and confidence to create, manage, and report on the financial exposure and compliance and risk postures of what matters most to their organization.

The RiskOptics ROAR Platform allows you to see, understand, and act on IT and cyber risk in real-time, automate compliance, and communicate the impact on your organization’s top priorities.

The RiskOptics ROAR Platform:

• Breaks down the functional and application silos that cause inefficiencies
• Slashes communication gaps and deficiencies that introduce unintended risk
• Enables organizations to share and reuse data across the platform
• Minimizes time spent on manual activities conducted in silos (for example, evidence gathering and risk assessments)
• Ensures a single source of truth across all risk management, cyber security, and compliance activities
• Saves time and money by automating your GRC processes, ensuring compliance, and protecting your business from risk.
• A real-time view of risk and compliance — framed around your business priorities — gives your teams the contextual insight to easily communicate with key stakeholders to make smart, strategic decisions.

Implementing an automated SaaS-based GRC platform or solution is particularly necessary if your business has experienced a data breach or security incident, has been fined or penalized for non-compliance, or has a high turnover rate of employees in critical risk and compliance roles.

With a comprehensive, automated GRC solution, your business is better protected from financial loss, decision-making is enhanced, legal liability is reduced, compliance is revamped, brand reputation is protected, and efficiency is improved.

“Immediately after finalizing our purchase, we had an urgent need come up, and the RiskOptics team was able to get us operational on that need within a week. Whereas other tools can take months to get real value out of them, we were getting real work done in days. The team has been very accommodating and very helpful, and it is refreshing to work with a team that is transparent and really wants to help customer success. It’s been a great experience.”

– Richard S., a mid-market customer

using the ROAR Platform from a G2 Review

With a unified, real-time view of risk and compliance — framed around your business priorities — you’ll have the contextual insight needed to communicate the business impact to key stakeholders and make strategic, risk-informed decisions to protect your organization, systems, and data and earn the trust of your customers, partners, and employees.

The ROAR Platform delivers a trusted, single source of truth by unifying risk management, cybersecurity, and compliance activities into a single solution.

Understand how the RiskOptics ROAR Platform secures your business. Register for a free, live demo today!

About RiskOptics

RiskOptics is the leader in IT risk management solutions, empowering organizations to convert risk into a strategic business advantage. The fully integrated and automated RiskOptics ROAR Platform provides a unified, real-time view of risk and compliance framed around business priorities, enabling CISOs and InfoSec teams to take a proactive approach to risk management.

RiskOptics customers are able to quantify the impact of risk on their business, communicate that impact to key stakeholders and mitigate expensive data breaches, system failures, lost opportunities and vulnerabilities across their own and third-party data while adhering to compliance requirements.