5 Metrics That Matter: How to Measure Trust in Your GRC Platform

More than ever, modern businesses that rely on technology now need to provide validation over their security and privacy programs. Enter your Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) program. 

Historically, audits provided point-in-time validation by checking off a series of boxes and requirements. However, today, your compliance program is critical to maintaining customer trust and accelerating deals. The number of frameworks your organization implements increases as your business operations scale, yet your GRC team struggles to incorporate these new frameworks when using manual processes. 

Adopting GRC automation is critical to your business, yet many organizations have no clear metrics for evaluating their solutions. The right GRC platform should do more than reduce risk. It should drive operational efficiency, accelerate sales cycles, and transform compliance into a strategic advantage. 

As you work to evaluate your GRC platform, these five metrics allow you to map business value to technology capability for insight into value. 

1. Policies Appropriately Mapped to Frameworks

Every framework has a different set of requirements, standards, and policies that your organization needs to implement and enforce. According to the 2025 State of GRC Report, 60% of organizations manage at least five frameworks. The work to manage and map these policies across frameworks becomes even more time-consuming, especially when one framework requires a specific policy.

Consider the following examples:

• Business continuity policy: Required by nearly every framework, law, and regulation
• Personal data management policy: Required by CCPA, CPRA, GDPR, and HITRUS
• Information governance policy: Required by CCM, DORA, HITRUST
• Privacy, use, and disclosure policy: Required by HIPAA

When assessing your GRC platform’s effectiveness, its ability to accurately map policies to frameworks provides insight into how much time your team saves. 

2. Time to Audit Readiness 

The 2025 State of GRC Report also found that, on average, organizations plan to add at least six new frameworks to their compliance program. With 52% of GRC teams already exhausted trying to identify and integrate new frameworks into their existing program, many face significant challenges trying to become audit-ready. 

Preparing for the initial audit is time consuming, especially when organizations need to document their cloud security. A GRC platform should centralize notifications and automate evidence gathering so that the organizations can be audit-ready faster. For example, the platform should be able to help by saving up to six months, enabling the team to focus on the core business functions rather than the audit process. 

As the organization implements more frameworks, the GRC platform’s value should reduce time to readiness for them. Built-in templates aligned to industry frameworks means that the organization can leverage pre-existing compliance work when it needs to incorporate new compliance frameworks. Additionally, the solution should also have customization that allows you to create and normalize new controls while directly mapping evidence.

3. Time Saved Preparing for Audits

Everyone says that audit preparation is time-consuming, but the time is usually spread across days, weeks, or even months, making it difficult to determine exactly how much time internal stakeholders spend. 

Manual tasks can cost an organization anywhere between 200 and 600 hours of time spent preparing for an audit. Even more challenging, as the company’s operations scale into new markets, it needs to implement additional compliance frameworks or requirements. 

When looking for KPIs that define your platform’s value, you should consider reductions in time spent:

• Collecting evidence.
• Discussing the audit report draft.
• Engaging in audit field work activities.
• Implementing control frameworks for new compliance requirements. 

For example, if your organization is spending approximately 60-70 hours per year on audit-related activities, your GRC platform should be able to reduce this time by up to 80%.  

4. Time to Closing Deals

As more customers request security compliance documentation as part of their vendor risk management processes, an organization’s ability to provide this information quickly is critical to closing deals faster. For the modern business, GRC platforms are more than audit solutions. They become business enablers and revenue generators. 

Organizations need to respond to security documentation requests and answer inbound security review questionnaires. These time-consuming manual processes often include:

• Days or weeks sourcing answers and collecting updated documentation 
• Multiple email exchanges with the prospect. 
• Internal, cross-functional coordination. 

These communications often delay deal progression or mean GRC teams deprioritize other initiatives. 

A trust center that leverages AI to answer security questions in real-time can reduce the time spent responding to these customer documents by up to 80%. With the ability to answer customer questions faster, the sales team reduces the overall sales cycle and improves revenue. 

5. Engagement with Security Documentation

With security and compliance as a business enabler, a trust management platform becomes a critical marketing and sales tool. Organizations that use a GRC platform to streamline sales processes often require prospects to use their emails when logging into the compliance documentation as a way to protect the sensitive data. 

These processes act as a valuable touchpoint for high intent prospects proactively evaluating a company’s data security practices. By syncing GRC analytics with their customer relationship management (CRM) tool, sales and marketing teams can use metrics around views and engagements to identify the prospects that are more likely to go to contract. This improves the marketing team’s ability to create targeted campaigns and the sales team to engage in follow up activities that help close deals. 

How Drata’s Automation Meets the Metrics

As business growth increasingly becomes a GRC initiative, organizations need to provide their teams with the tools that transform them into a business enabler. With Drata’s Trust Center, organizations can:

• Automate evidence collection and control monitoring across 20+ frameworks.
• Replace screenshots and spreadsheets with continuous testing and centralized tracking.
• Accelerate audit readiness by being continuously prepared for audits.
• Tie security activity to revenue outcomes. 
• Quantify the cost reductions to prove operational efficiency. 
• Revolutionize compliance by turning it into a strategic sales tool. 

Drata is the leader in AI-native Trust Management. Over 7,500 organizations globally, including over a third of the Cloud 100, use Drata to automate governance, risk, compliance, and assurance resulting in a strong security posture, streamlined security reviews, lower costs, and less time spent preparing for audits.

Turn compliance into a catalyst. Learn how Drata customers are shifting GRC from reactive to revenue-enabling. Book a demo today.