GRC Best Practices for Streamlining Compliance Workflows and Security Transparency

The New Compliance Reality

Compliance used to be perceived by some as a background task - quiet, manual, and largely invisible. Today, it's under an unrelenting spotlight. Boards demand live dashboards. Customers send detailed security questionnaires before they even sign. Regulators, including the SEC and EU authorities, are enforcing faster, broader, and deeper disclosures.

GRC is no longer back of office - it's front and center, and the old ways of managing it simply no longer relevant. This article breaks down the modern GRC landscape and provides a practical roadmap for transforming compliance operations.

The Modern Compliance Landscape

What Has Changed?

GRC teams today operate in a fundamentally different environment than just two years ago. The pressure to move fast, prove trustworthiness, and maintain compliance across multiple frameworks has never been higher.

New regulations like DORA, NIS2, and the SEC Cybersecurity Disclosure Rule have significantly raised compliance expectations. 

DORA enforces strict ICT risk management, including incident management and reporting requirements. NIS2 expands cybersecurity obligations across numerous critical sectors. The SEC now requires public companies to disclose material incidents within four business days.

These frameworks demand more than policies; they require systems, audit trails, and provable readiness at a moment's notice.

Simultaneously, organizations manage more third-party relationships than ever, with enterprises reporting a significant increase in vendor relationships year-over-year. This expansion has led to a surge in security questionnaires, which are also growing in length and complexity.

The cadence of compliance has also fundamentally shifted. Boards, partners, and customers no longer wait for annual audits - they expect real-time, dashboard-level visibility. 

Whether it's a live AI trust center or continuous control monitoring, transparency has become more like a live stream, no-longer a PDF.

‍

‍

The Cost of Staying Manual

Collecting evidence manually, chasing colleagues for screenshots, and digging through Jira tickets isn't just time-consuming - it's unsustainable. 

The average time spent on manual evidence collection is significant, with substantial duplicate evidence requests common when frameworks overlap. This repetitive cycle drains team resources and introduces errors that can lead to failed audits.

When risks and controls live in disconnected tools, updates don't sync. Organizations often experience considerable delays between control failure and risk register updates. These blind spots can become breaches or regulatory failures with significant financial consequences.

Manual responses to vendor risk assessments directly impact revenue as well. Key impacts include:

• Extended sales cycles - Security reviews can significantly delay deals. In fact, 41% of businesses without continuous compliance report slowdowns in their sales cycle.
• Lost business opportunities - Lost business opportunities can occur due to slow security responses.

Automating this process with security questionnaire automation not only saves time but also directly supports revenue goals.

Where Workflows Break: Common Pitfalls

No Single Source of Truth

Most GRC teams still juggle risk and control data across Excel, email threads, and Slack messages. Around 40% of compliance teams use basic productivity tools such as word processors and spreadsheets to streamline and run processes, while many store evidence across numerous platforms.

Indeed, 92% of organizations rely on three or more tools just to gather audit evidence. This fragmented setup creates confusion, duplicates work, and makes it nearly impossible to maintain real-time oversight.

Without a central platform to manage controls, evidence, risks, and ownership, the entire compliance operation becomes reactive instead of strategic. Creating a unified system of record is essential for maintaining consistency and enabling real-time visibility.

Manual Evidence Collection

Evidence collection remains one of the single most time-consuming compliance activities. Organizations report spending significant time gathering evidence for each audit, with many spending over five hours per week on manual compliance tasks, and many still relying heavily on screenshots and manual documentation. Not only is this inefficient, but it also increases the risk of missing deadlines or delivering inconsistent documentation.

The solution lies in connecting your GRC platform with the systems where evidence naturally exists - AWS for cloud configurations, GitHub for code reviews, Jira for change management, and HR systems for training records. 

By automating these connections, you can transform a process that takes weeks into one that happens continuously in the background.

Disconnected Risk and Control Tracking

In many organizations, risks exist in one system while controls live in another. This disconnection means a failed control might not update your risk register for weeks, creating dangerous blind spots. Organizations with disconnected systems often take considerable time to update risk registers after control failures.

Modern GRC requires two-way links between risks and controls, with automated alerts when status changes. This connection ensures your risk picture remains accurate and current, enabling proactive management rather than reactive remediation.

Transparency Only During Audits

The most forward-looking organizations have moved beyond point-in-time audits. They’ve adopted mature continuous control monitoring, using live data and real-time dashboards to maintain constant oversight. This proactive approach ensures risks and control failures are identified early, not after the fact.

Meanwhile, many companies are still stuck in reactive cycles, where GRC systems only come to life during audit season. That lag doesn’t meet today’s expectations. Boards, partners, and regulators now demand transparency on demand, not just once a year.

Continuous assurance has become the new baseline. It’s not just a best practice, it’s a competitive advantage.

GRC Best Practices to Streamline and Scale

Centralized Control Ownership

Strong GRC starts with accountability. Every control should have a clearly defined owner responsible for monitoring, updates, and audit readiness. This prevents bottlenecks and confusion when issues arise.

Cross-framework control mapping is equally important. By mapping controls across multiple frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR, you can avoid duplication of effort and manage multiple compliance requirements with fewer resources. A financial services firm reduced their control count from 842 to 317 through effective mapping, while improving coverage across six regulatory frameworks.

Automate Evidence Collection

Manual evidence collection is still one of the biggest time sinks in compliance. By integrating your GRC platform with core systems, you can transform this process from periodic scrambles into continuous collection.

The most effective approach is to identify your high-volume evidence types and map them to specific systems - AWS/Cloud platforms for security configurations, GitHub for code reviews, ITSM tools for change management, and HR systems for training records. 

Enable Continuous Monitoring

Compliance can't just be point-in-time anymore. Modern GRC requires always-on visibility through dashboards that show the live status of controls - what's working, what's overdue, and where failures are happening.

When a control fails, your system should automatically update the associated risk register and trigger alerts to the appropriate owners. 

This real-time approach reduces the mean time to remediate issues and provides stakeholders with an accurate picture of your compliance posture at any moment.

Use Standardized, Repeatable Workflows

Templates and playbooks are key to scaling GRC operations efficiently. Whether you're onboarding new frameworks, managing control failures, or responding to vendor assessments, standardized processes reduce errors and help teams move faster.

One technology company that streamlined its approach cut average response times from 8.2 days to just 1.5, while also improving accuracy from 76% to 94%. This operational efficiency directly contributed to a 28% reduction in their overall sales cycle length.

Preparing for external reviews becomes much easier when your team knows what’s coming. Having a clear, well-organized system - including a list of critical questions buyers are likely to ask - can eliminate guesswork and prevent delays during review cycles.

Standardized workflows improve speed and raise the overall quality and consistency of compliance operations, especially when integrated with automation and a central knowledge base.

Make Transparency a Metric

Don't just aim for transparency - measure it systematically. Track how fast you respond to control failures, how long it takes to close audit findings, and how current your risk register is. These metrics provide clear indicators of GRC program effectiveness.

Consider going further with public-facing dashboards or a live AI trust center that showcases your security posture to customers and partners. A SaaS provider implemented this approach and reduced inbound security questionnaires by 62% while shortening their sales cycle by over two weeks.

Choosing the Right Tools

Avoid the common trap of GRC tool sprawl. Organizations with fragmented approaches use multiple different tools, sometimes 3 or more, just for gathering audit evidence, creating inefficiency and inconsistency. Instead, focus on consolidation - fewer tools that do more, with native integrations and unified data.

Your GRC stack should connect effortlessly with the systems your teams already rely on. The most critical integration points include:

• Core operations systems - AWS/cloud platforms, DevOps tools, ITSM platforms
• Business systems - HRIS, document management, learning management systems

This connectivity is essential for automating evidence collection and maintaining accurate risk information.

AI has also become essential in modern GRC, particularly for security questionnaire automation. Solutions like Vendict use AI to understand incoming questions, generate accurate responses from your knowledge base, and maintain consistency across assessments. This automation can significantly reduce questionnaire response time while improving accuracy.

Real-World Impact: Turning GRC into a Strategic Asset

At Similarweb, managing security questionnaires and DDQs was pulling the security team away from strategic work. Automation brought relief. Tasks that once took days now take just hours. Their CISO highlighted how leveraging framework analysis for ISO 27001 and SOC 2 significantly reduced review time and improved the overall process.

Aidoc, working in the healthcare AI space, faced long sales delays due to compliance workflows. Sometimes, they had to wait up to 100 days to complete security questionnaires. By shifting to an automated system, they reduced that to just six days, freeing up the sales team to focus on growth instead of admin.

The gains for Orca Security and SecuriThings were just as clear. Orca slashed response times on browser-based questionnaires by over 90%. SecuriThings used automation to support ISO and SOC 2 readiness, speeding up onboarding and reducing the need for constant back-and-forth between teams.

The outcome is consistent across these companies: when compliance workflows stop relying on spreadsheets and start running intelligently, teams save time, respond faster, and unlock measurable business value.

Conclusion:

GRC isn't just about passing audits anymore. It's about building a system that runs continuously, tracks risks, maps controls, collects evidence, and delivers real-time visibility to both internal and external stakeholders.

Modern frameworks such as DORA, NIS2, and SEC rules have raised the bar. So have your customers. Manual, reactive workflows won't scale in this environment, and they certainly won't build trust.

The good news? With the right tools, integrations, and mindset, GRC can shift from overhead to advantage. 

Organizations that implement the best practices in this guide typically see significant reductions in questionnaire response time, shorter sales cycles for security-conscious customers, and improved visibility for all stakeholders.

The question isn't whether you can afford to modernize your GRC program - it's whether you can afford not to.