How to Create a Feedback Loop Between Your GRC Program and Your People

In the security and compliance world, professionals continuously tout the line, “it’s a team sport.” Implementing a security program requires having the right engineers to write detections and analysts to respond to manage incident response. Maintaining the program requires having the technologies that enable monitoring and investigations. Compliance requires having internal people reviewing laws and regulations then mapping controls to the frameworks. 

Often, organizations forget that all workforce members are critical to their security and compliance programs. A sales team member with a weak password can be the way an attacker evades detections and steals data. A marketing team member’s mobile phone running an outdated operating system can have a vulnerability that attackers exploit to deliver ransomware. The idea that team work makes the compliance dream work means having everyone invested in the organization’s security and compliance programs. 

To create a sense of collective ownership over security and compliance, organizations must create feedback loops between their Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) Programs and their overarching workforce members. 

How People Often Perceive GRC

People often perceive GRC the same way they thought about homework in high school: busy work that seems to have no connection to their real lives. When they view GRC as nothing more than a set of disconnected policies that only exist so an auditor can check off some boxes on an unknown form, people see little value in the time and effort that compliance requires. 

Often, GRC activities are just another task on an already too long to-do list. People can feel disconnected from the GRC program for various reasons, including:

• Unclear objectives: Failure to clarify how policies, controls, and audits impact business objectives and employee performance indicators. 
• Complex processes: Legalese in policies and frameworks that makes participation frustrating. 
• Lack of dialogue: Top-down processes that lack insight into how or why they exist, especially when they create additional work for employees. 
• Minimal engagement: Experience limited to audits, incidents, or training sessions. 
• Punitive culture: Focusing on corporate fines and penalties rather than individual rewards and value. 
• Overload and fatigue: Time-consuming processes and document collection that prevent people from focusing on strategic tasks. 

GRC Transparency: Connecting People to the Processes

In many organizations, GRC programs exist as an abstract idea because most people have no access to the GRC data or how the program enables their job functions. However, when organizations implement trust management platforms, they transform the conceptual into the tangible. Here's how.

Turn the Passive into Active

Trust management platforms enable organizations to share their compliance data with various stakeholders across the organization, connecting people to security and compliance. The platforms allow security and IT teams to implement the principle of least privilege, aligning user job functions to the compliance data they need, including information about:

• Current control effectiveness. 
• Required policies and certifications. 
• Security questionnaires and reports. 

By aligning employee job functions to the compliance data they need, organizations connect these typically siloed activities into meaningful insights. For example, when employees have insight into how password policies impact compliance and security then connect that to their daily processes, they are more likely to implement secure logins. 

Map GRC to Business and Revenue Objectives

In today’s interconnected business environment, compliance becomes a market differentiator. To meet their own compliance objectives, customers require vendors to provide security attestations, through audit reports and questionnaires. When organizations incorporate trust management platforms, they embed audit readiness and compliance into their go-to-market strategies. 

When integrated into customer relationship management (CRM) tools, trust management platforms directly impact sale and marketing initiatives by:

• Reducing the sales cycle: Providing sales teams and prospects with access to compliance data earlier in the process to reduce time spent tracking down documents. 
• Driving lead generation: Using prospect emails for trust management platform access to track the buyer journey for targeted marketing campaigns as buyers move through their journey. 
• Responding to buyers: Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) to automate the security questionnaire response process, providing an improved customer experience even before closing the deal.

Foster Continuous Improvement

Security and compliance are not a one-and-done initiative. From new threats to new compliance frameworks, organizations need to continuously review controls and their effectiveness. When organizations holistically integrate their GRC programs into daily operations, they can identify areas of improvement. By providing access to compliance metrics and artifacts, organizations can create a feedback loop based on employee and customer needs. 

Some examples of how organizations can foster continuous improvement by providing access to a trust management platform include:

• Tracking usage to identify the most popular artifacts, enabling security and compliance teams to focus on the controls and compliance efforts that matter the most to customers and employees. 
• Sharing insights with senior leadership and the board of directors to help drive future technology investments by focusing on the security and compliance initiatives that customers care about. 
• Identifying new compliance frameworks by reviewing the security questions that require manual responses when leveraging LLMs, meaning that the data is not available across current compliance and audit artifacts. 

Using a Trust Management Platform to Create a Feedback Loop

Continuous monitoring with a user-informed trust management platform enables organizations to create a feedback loop that drives employee engagement. When implemented, these platforms provide multiple benefits both to the GRC team and to the wider organization.

Centralize Control for a Single Source of Truth

A trust management platform consolidates control monitoring, evidence collections, and framework mapping into a single, unified dashboard. With comprehensive visibility across people, processes, and technologies, organizations can identify GRC strengths and areas of improvement faster. 

With all compliance actions and artifacts centralized, organizations create a continuous feedback cycle:

• Reviewing security and GRC current state in dashboards. 
• Aggregating customer questionnaires and audit findings to identify, address, and track issues. 
• Leveraging visibility into trends to make data-driven decisions around program improvements and security investments. 

Trigger Continuous Improvement with Real-Time Monitoring

Maintaining a continuously compliant environment requires integrations across the various IT and security tools that manage controls. Just as a security information and event management (SIEM) solution detects anomalous activity indicating a potential incident, a trust management platform monitors controls’ effectiveness to identify compliance drift. 

By continuously monitoring compliance, organizations create an interactive feedback loop across:

• Rapid responses to control failures or anomalies that can impact customer trust. 
• Documentation around remediation actions and timing that provide assurance over compliance posture across internal and external stakeholders, including leadership, auditors, and customers. 
• Trends over time to inform iterations or processes or controls, improving overarching security and compliance. 

Drive Strategic Business Initiatives with Customized Compliance Capabilities

As organizations transform GRC into a revenue-enabler, they can more strategically align business and compliance objectives. However, business needs may not always map perfectly to pre-defined compliance frameworks. When a trust management platform provides customization, organizations can precisely define, map, and track:

• Actual operational risks related to unique business needs. 
• Create and test custom controls to validate controls and provide assurance over compliance. 
• Continuously monitor effectiveness and review trends to improve security and compliance over time. 

How Drata Helps Create a Feedback Loop Across the Organization

Drata’s trust management platform enables organizations to customize and automate GRC tasks which drives improved metrics around the program’s effectiveness. Our end-to-end trust management platform offers:

• Pre-mapped risk library and custom risk scoring capabilities so organizations can streamline risk assessments while still defining thresholds that meet their specific needs.
• Treatment plans based on risks’ impact and likelihood to help accelerate audit readiness. 
• Continuous controls and risk monitoring for data-driven insights around the GRC program’s performance. 
• A Trust Center that organizations can use to expedite customer vendor reviews by showing them pertinent security information, either on an as-needed basis or publicly. 

It's time to turn GRC program monitoring from qualitative to quantitative. Learn how Drata customers are using GRC to make data-driven decisions and book your demo today.