8 Steps to Building a Modern Trust Management Program

The biggest cyberthreat in 2026? You haven’t even heard of it yet.

That’s how it typically goes—bad actors are constantly refining their methods to adapt to the defenses companies enact. The economic incentives of pulling off a big hack perpetuate this cycle, and companies are left hoping they’re not the ones to learn about the newest exploit firsthand.

Or, most companies are. Even businesses with mature GRC (governance, risk management, and compliance) programs have suffered costly outages and breaches. That’s why forward-thinking leaders take a proactive approach to cybersecurity and related practices like risk management and compliance. 

Trust management is the new gold standard. It builds on the most successful GRC efforts and introduces new elements to counter their shortcomings. It’s a set of best practices created for a business world where your most important and valuable functions and data rely on the internet and technology. As the name suggests, the goal is to secure your company’s assets and reputation while proving to current and prospective customers that their trust is well-placed with you.

Here’s how to evolve your GRC practices into a holistic trust management program that helps your team work efficiently while increasing customers’ confidence in your business. 

What Is a Trust Management Program?

A trust management program is a set of functions and practices enacted to reduce security, compliance, and reputational risks. It covers the same base functions as a GRC program but adds new forms of risk monitoring, third-party (vendor) assurance, and public-facing communications. Trust management programs aim to increase the visibility, cohesion, and proactivity of your compliance, risk, and security work.

Trust management programs aren’t one-size-fits-all systems. Instead, they provide an infinitely adaptable framework so companies can implement practices that meet their specific needs.

A trust management program can help you:

• Log and evaluate risks to your company’s operations.
• Reduce sales cycle length and customer acquisition costs.
• Validate code before it reaches production.
• Create, disseminate, and update company policies regarding security and compliance practices.
• Vet third-party vendors and ensure they continue to meet your needs.
• Catch and remediate system issues that lead to unexpected downtime.
• Track and adjust who has access to internal systems.
• Prepare for annual audits.

…and more, depending on what your company needs. 

Typically, companies will use a trust management platform like Drata to enable their efforts. These platforms integrate deeply into your tech stack to provide high visibility into your systems and automate processes like control testing and evidence collection. However, it’s just as important that you build a culture that values trust building. Successful trust management programs require the efforts of everyone in the workforce.

Why Traditional GRC Approaches Fall Short

Historically, GRC programs have a few major gaps that (at best) interfere with growth and (at worst) introduce major risks.

They’re still siloed. Though GRC was meant to integrate various risk and compliance efforts, mature GRC programs often split the three functions across three teams. That means important information often falls through the cracks and leaves risks unaddressed.

They’re cyclical, not proactive. Most GRC work is scheduled around audits, risk reviews, and other periodic assessments. Teams are often forced to put aside work that doesn’t pertain to the current preparation or remediation efforts, leaving companies unprepared for issues that don’t slot neatly within a given category or timeframe.

They lack transparency. GRC efforts may not be widely shared internally, much less to outside parties. This leads to employees not understanding what their company can guarantee to its customers. 

By contrast, trust management more fully integrates GRC practices, uses automation to give teams more flexibility to address the most important issues, and builds in transparency so stakeholders and potential clients can understand how you ensure trust at all levels of your operations. 

8 Steps to Implementing a Trust Management Program

If your company is still relying on traditional GRC efforts, now is the time to start your transformation to an integrated trust management program. Your company will reap multiple benefits, including shorter sales cycles and a more informed executive team. And you’ll have more confidence that your systems are truly secure thanks to the continuous monitoring you’ll implement. 

Here are the eight steps you’ll need to get your new program up and running.

Tip: All of the following steps are easier if you’ve already implemented a trust management platform; some won’t be possible without one. We’ll lay out the details of how each step works regardless, but the integrated nature of trust management programs relies on modern software like Drata. 

Step 1: Assess Your Current Security, Compliance, and Risk Posture

Are your security practices in line with recommendations? Does your company have plans in place to mitigate its biggest risks? Do you even know what those risks are? 

And what about compliance—if a surprise audit was initiated tomorrow, do you know if you’d pass?

If you already have a GRC program in place, you may know where to find some of these answers (or at least, the answer as of six months ago). But you may also find that some of the answers live with a specific individual…and hopefully they’re available if you’re asking during a crisis.

With a trust management program in place, you’ll have constant visibility into your security, compliance, and risk management efforts. But to set your program’s goals and priorities, you need to know where you stand now. If you’ve never done a formal risk assessment (or yours is wildly out of date), that’s your first goal. Bring together department leads that oversee security, compliance, operations, IT, and similar duties. You’ll want their perspectives as you build a centralized risk register to record your efforts.

Tip: Drata can store your risk register and treatment plans, and even allows you to assign Jira tasks to your team when you’re planning remediation efforts. Everything is visible and centralized, so you can see what’s been achieved and what still needs to be addressed.

Step 2: Define Your Trust Objectives and Stakeholders

Trust management programs are made to be flexible. To define yours, you’ll need to set goals. Build on what you learned in step one to determine what your program needs to do for your company. Your objectives may include things like:

• Document cybersecurity best practices and make sure all employees are trained on them.
• Keep an up-to-date risk register.
• Create mitigation plans for the most severe risks by the end of next quarter.
• Reach and maintain compliance with ISO 27001 and SOC 2.
• Ensure similar compliance among all third-party vendors.

Your objectives should correspond to your company’s most pressing needs and can evolve as you grow. Some may be short-term goals that you can check off the list; others will be ongoing concerns that you’ll want to build processes around. 

It’s also important to think about your stakeholders. Those who participated in the risk assessment are your on-the-ground experts who will be involved in planning and execution efforts. Executives and board members won’t take an active role, but will need to see the results of your efforts. 

Your customers and clients are also stakeholders in their own way—they need to know they can trust you to perform your function while safeguarding their data. You won’t be asking them to participate in your trust management program, but they’re one of the beneficiaries, so your efforts should address their needs. For example, clients in healthcare will need to know if you’re HIPAA compliant, while those who trust you with payment data will require proof that you adhere to PCI DSS. Making this information readily available is part of earning their trust.

Step 3: Set Up Automated Access Reviews

Secure systems start with strong internal controls, the most basic of which address systems access. Most, if not all, companies already practice some form of user access reviews. But periodic assessments aren’t always enough to catch suspicious behavior.  They’re almost certainly not going to stop breaches before they escalate.

Trust management platforms continuously monitor user privileges and access, and use machine learning to flag anomalies. Your team gets alerts for suspicious activities so they can investigate right away. The sooner they can catch and remove bad actors, the more secure your company stays. 

With automation, your team can also catch issues like access creep or misuse of admin privileges before audits flag them as security issues. They’ll receive regular reports, with no extra work required on their part. That frees them up for work that requires human judgment,like whether that midnight login was from a night owl employee, or someone who stole their credentials.

Tip: Drata can organize access reports by role and map them to your compliance framework so you can see at a glance whether your access framework is working as desired. And, the data is filed as evidence to streamline your audit prep process.  

Step 4: Establish Continuous Control Monitoring

Security must be an ongoing focus and practice for companies that want to earn consumers’ trust. Traditional GRC treats compliance work as part of audit prep; trust management programs deeply integrate with your systems for continuous compliance so your company is always protected and audit-ready. 

Continuous control monitoring tools identify the controls associated with the security and privacy frameworks your company uses, then automatically test each one daily. Teams receive alerts for failed tests—for example, if a firewall is misconfigured, they’ll get a message with remediation suggestions. 

This capability enables year-round transparency and immediate remediation, versus the GRC standard of reviewing controls as part of audit prep. Your team can be confident in your systems’ security at all times, and audits won’t come with unwelcome surprises.

Tip: Drata allows you to implement custom controls and tests so you can create automations that meet your organization’s unique needs. Our no-code tools enable teams to build workflows that ensure continuous compliance your way. 

Step 5: Shift Compliance Left in Your Development Process

Rather than addressing security and compliance concerns at the end of your development cycle, Shift-Left practices introduce checks earlier in the process. It’s a smarter way to build: Devs work within guardrails rather than learning about them after their code has been completed, and then having to complete major rewrites. Plus, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tests catch misconfiguration errors before they cause security issues. 

Shift-Left compliance and security has clear benefits, but many organizations drag their feet on enacting new processes because they don’t want to hamstring their product development work. Developers and security teams both have to buy in to ongoing review and testing. 

A trust management platform that connects to your developer tools makes the transition much easier. You can set controls and define guardrails when you implement the platform, then set up tests that will alert developers to potential issues as they’re working. The end result is better production code that doesn’t require a string of rewrites from developers.

Step 6: Automate Evidence Collection Across Your Stack

Trust management platforms use integrations and API access to gather evidence for audits. Historically, collecting, organizing, and verifying evidence has been a time-consuming task. With a specialized tool doing the work for you, your team will save time—not to mention the stress of scrambling to compile missing information mid-audit. 

Automations that handle important work like audit prep must keep humans in the loop. Tools like Drata gather the evidence, then pass it off to knowledgeable team members for verification before it’s submitted to auditors. It’s the best way to remove the busywork while maintaining human control over an important part of audit prep.

Step 7: Integrate Risk Management and Vendor Assessment

The work of identifying, scoring, and mitigating risks often ends up siloed by department. The same goes for vendor risk assessment and management. As a result, there’s little visibility and standardization, which can result in uneven efforts, security gaps (where each team thinks the other has handled it), and redundant work. 

It’s time to unify these processes by implementing a risk management framework and automations that support ongoing mitigation and monitoring efforts. Your trust management program makes it easy to centralize these responsibilities with tools that automate important tasks like risk mapping and testing. Alerts encourage stakeholders to create mitigation plans so threats get addressed before they cause a problem. 

The same is true for vendor risk management, which (when done well) goes far beyond due diligence. Your trust management program publishes your vendor policies and standards so every team is on the same page. During the vetting process, your employees can turn to your platform for the security questionnaire and other assessment documents they should use. And, tools like Drata can automate continuous monitoring of third-party risks. 

Centralization brings one more benefit: visibility. Dashboards bring all your risk information together into one place so anyone can see and understand your work. Whether you want to eliminate redundant work or answer stakeholders’ questions on your risk management practices and risk mitigation progress, your trust management platform will have your back. 

Step 8: Deploy a Trust Center for External Communication

Passing your audits, continuously maintaining compliance, and having strong internal policies to protect your systems and data can be a huge differentiator—if your clients know what your company has to offer. A Trust Center brings together all the pertinent information and allows you to selectively publish the data that will bolster your company’s reputation.

Diligent companies vet their vendors before signing contracts; a Trust Center expedites the process by publishing the information that prospective customers need to do that work. You won’t get bogged down in “Re: Re: Re: Re: Security Attestation” email chains or back-and-forths as you try to verify answers for security questionnaires. When you update your security and compliance posture, publish it in your Trust Center so everyone is kept in the loop.

Tip: Drata understands that some information shouldn’t be published. We make it easy to share documents with verified parties through an automated NDA process. You can trust in the security of important company information without having to manually issue each contract.

Drata Is Your All-in-One Trust Management Solution

Trust is an important currency in today’s business world, and there’s no way to earn it without putting resources into your security and compliance programs. Thankfully, “resources” doesn’t have to mean time-consuming manual labor. Invest in a trust management solution like Drata to kickstart your company’s transformation into a trust-building machine. 

Drata offers modern solutions to companies that are ready to go beyond traditional GRC and introduce more transparency and uniformity into their processes. For those who are new to focusing on security and compliance, Drata offers tools and support to help you implement a trust management program and train employees. Those with a foundation to build on can customize Drata to meet their needs and automate busywork, so employees have more time for high-level tasks. 

The age of reactive security and compliance work is over. Tomorrow’s winners will build proactivity into every step of their processes. 

Get started with your trust management transformation today: Schedule a Demo to see what Drata can do for your organization. 

Frequently Asked Questions About Trust Managment Programs

What is the Difference Between Trust management and GRC?

Traditional GRC is often siloed, lacks transparency, and schedules tasks and processes in a periodic manner to match audit cycles. Trust management centralizes GRC processes to support more visibility and uniformity. It also uses automation and machine learning to provide continuous assurance and real-time knowledge that allows teams to work proactively. 

What is a Trust Management Program?

A trust management program is a modern way of managing your company’s security and compliance needs. It’s a framework that organizes continuous monitoring of security, risk, and compliance issues while automating time-intensive tasks so your company has more visibility into its systems.

How Do I Launch a Trust Management Program?

To launch your trust management program, bring GRC work into a centralized location and configure automations that support your security, risk management, and compliance goals. Implementing a trust management platform like Drata will give you access to the necessary capabilities.