Building a Business Case for GRC Software

There's a hushed undercurrent sweeping through the compliance and risk management landscape, challenging our IT infrastructure and dismantling the silos we thought kept initial investments low.

As it turns out, our new data access came with a duality: greater breadth of information, greater number of security challenges. When you introduce modular platforms to accurately and consistently measure compliance channels, you begin thinking of GRC as a neighborhood, rather than a single factory.

The technological web keeps growing, and there is a tendency for governance, risk assessment, and compliance projects to pivot on a case-by-case basis, layering tools rather than integrating them.

Integrated Risk Management (IRM), a Misnomer for Salvaged GRC

What was the worst thing to ever happen to GRC? Segmenting out its moving parts, and letting them fend for themselves. We mistakenly began looking at governance, risk, and compliance as three, different schools of thought.

We needed a scapegoat for infrastructural failures, and this is why we've abandoned conventional GRC solutions for Integrated Risk Management (IRM). While much of the industry considers this a paradigm shift, it is more of a revitalization.

IRM is wrongfully identified as a new discipline. In reality, GRC is simply going through a rebranding after a period of bad press. Yes, vendors are leveling their GRC neighborhoods, but they are collecting all the structural elements from the rubble to build their IRM powerhouses.

You should think of IRM as a derivative of GRC, rather than a novelty.

A custom, integrated platform rules against modular GRC investments. One-off, need-driven strategies are facing extinction. We think of IRM as a call to action, a call for more strategic and holistic GRC platforms.

Demystifying Your Decision-Making Process

What does this mean for you? Your strategy may be nearsighted. IRM encourages companies to zoom out, thinking beyond current needs to address the governance, compliance, and risk of tomorrow.

Whether you are just now allocating the resources to build a GRC platform or redirecting a legacy system to reflect the IRM ideology, contextualize the solutions using your stack of business objectives—what status do you hope to achieve and what is the status now?

GRC platforms bring together many moving parts, implementing an integrated framework to monitor and coordinate data from an array of sources.

If you truly want to demystify the decision-making process, demystify your GRC strategy.

Let's restore interlinkage. Risk dictates governance, and governance dictates compliance, and so on. If security is your number one concern, and you take the steps to engineer a one-dimensional capability to address those needs, you disadvantage yourself on the compliance front and create a software monologue no other data channel can draw from.

You know this:

• You need a solution to identify and mitigate risk

• Failure to comply attracts litigation

• Security is a constant pain point

• Governance uses auditing as a crutch

• IT silos plague ROI

IRM covers all fronts, building bridges between GRC subcultures to covert monologues to dialogue. There is no value in isolated systems, especially if we consider how frenetic our data needs are and how next-generation technologies will impact those data needs.

An open circuit automates the processes you know you need, and issues powerful analytics to circumvent vulnerabilities. Through IRM, you build an all-seeing, all-knowing dashboard where no dimension of the GRC umbrella goes neglected.

Understanding the Organization

Don't let your takeaway be that you need to implement a GRC technology platform as soon as possible. Let your takeaway be to contextualize integrated GRC. Custom GRC software is most effective when it is built to conquer a specific set of pain points.

What we mean by that-evaluate your current costs to justify your investment. The cost of building a GRC platform is an serious undertaking, factoring in the hardware, the software development, and the implementation services.

The payoff is tenfold your investment; you automate data aggregation and access reporting modules, you decrease your auditing budget, and inevitably you encounter a drop in incidents and fines.

The acuter your preexisting challenges are, the quicker you will turn a favorable ROI. Articulating those challenges prior to development helps you form a business case for implementation.

We believe there is a nagging and unprecedented imperative for custom, integrated GRC software platforms, and the sooner you realize that everything connects to everything else, the sooner you can conquer software silos once and for all.

Founded in 2000, Chetu is a global provider of customized software development solutions and support services. Chetu's specialized technology and industry experts serve startups, SMBs, and Fortune 500 companies with an unparalleled software delivery model suited to the needs of the client. Chetu's one-stop-shop model spans the entire software technology spectrum. Headquartered in Plantation, Florida, Chetu has fourteen locations throughout the U.S. and abroad.