Best Ways To Make GRC Work When Budget is Tight 

We’ve all seen it: Compliance teams deluged by regulatory requirements, constant red alerts about software vulnerabilities that need to be patched, complicated login procedures, and new guidelines for passwords that are so complex- even their owners can’t remember them. 

Investment in already-strained security and compliance processes may be postponed time and again because operational departments are deemed more indispensable to business objectives than security departments. The belt around GRC gets tightened just another notch.

With a recession looming, businesses are taking measures to ensure they’re able to surf over the economic tides strategically, and GRC management tools tend to bare much of the brunt.

After all, isn’t  GRC supposed to be all about reducing costs?

Recession and Regulations Coming Up Soon

Businesses are facing a highly regulated environment and a rapidly evolving threat landscape against the backdrop of economic uncertainty and talk of recession. No security leader wants to leave their organization exposed in any way, so the question is how to make your GRC system stretch itself when resources are tight. 

Standardized enforcement isn’t going anywhere, and will probably be increasing. With the astronomical sums associated with noncompliance, it’s important to remember that your organization is saving money by investing in integrated GRC software.

Even so, businesses must weigh the cost of compliance while simultaneously keeping a watchful eye on the finite corporate budget. By being smart about how you approach GRC, you can make the most of an uncertain economic future while maintaining good GRC practices, even with budget constraints. 

When it comes to small and medium-sized businesses, in particular, the lack of adequate budget allocated for information security is a problem even in good economic times. It should be understood that small-sized businesses demand a higher percentage of financial resources to maintain compliance with regulatory laws than large-sized businesses. GRC resources may be scarce in SMBs even without the additional ‘burden’ of an economic recession.

Is GRC Worth the Investment?

In classic short-sightedness, some SMBs tend to favor revenue-generating activities over security processes due to budgetary constraints. This could prove to be very dangerous in the long run as the financial losses due to lack of information security could far exceed the cost saved by not installing  GRC risk solutions and implementing security controls in the first place.  

For instance:

• In case of a data breach, customer and employee data could be extracted by unauthorized and malicious users, leaked online for other similar miscreants to use, and could ultimately cause loss of identity, social security, or financial resources to the customers or employees. 
• Your customers could lose trust in your organization and choose alternative options in the market. 
• If legal action is required, steep court-related expenses can further lead to heavy financial losses and penalties for the company.

Let’s start by understanding some realities that some companies face while they struggle to maintain GRC on a budget.

• Regulatory requirements are increasing in scope and demand. 

• New incident reporting regulations for public companies have recently been released by the SEC to standardize disclosures regarding cybersecurity risk management, strategy, governance, and incident reporting. 
• State privacy laws are sprouting like mushrooms across the breadth of the US, putting more businesses into the eligibility bracket of ever-increasing privacy laws.

• Threat actors are as active as ever and increasingly looking to identify and exploit weaknesses in core technologies. A lapse in proactive GRC processes can have a significant impact on your bottom line.
• In the absence of a dedicated GRC department, business leaders find it difficult to focus on GRC, especially if they perceive it as being disjointed from their primary business goals. 

Given these constraints, what steps can you take to optimize GRC tool benefits in a constrained spending environment?

Best Practices for Maintaining GRC on a Budget

Validate Existing Controls

Are you one of those entities that have adopted a dozen or more GRC management tools? Mapping their functional overlaps will help you get a clearer view of extraneous tools so you can rationalize which solutions can be dropped. Companies should invest at least some resources in validating that the solutions in place are accomplishing a dedicated purpose and operating as intended.

Start With a Risk Assessment

A risk assessment will aid in determining the risks your company faces and how to minimize and mitigate them. A risk-based strategy compliance strategy is the best possible way to implement a GRC system compliance effort. Risks may fluctuate over time due to the unpredictability of an economic downturn.  Maintaining awareness of any changes to the organization’s risk profile will allow for the timely adaptation of policies and procedures as new hazards arise. 

Prioritize Risk

Prioritize risks and focus on the most critical areas: Identify the risks that have the greatest impact on your organization and allocate resources accordingly.

Start with the highest risk value mitigations, then factor in available resources. Rebalance your risk mitigation efforts and timeline as required and document all risks that are accepted or need additional external resources. Periodically brief any revised risk posture and required resources to leadership.

Explore alternative mitigations and compensating controls that could be used that may offer effective risk reduction at a reduced cost. 

Invest in Automated Technology

Invest in cost-effective GRC risk management software to automate manual processes, improve data management, and enhance risk monitoring.

Automated technologies can help reduce the amount of time required by employees to perform compliance tasks. This can provide various advantages to the organization and shift the onus of tedious data collection processes into more of an analytical role.

Document collection, which is fundamental for due diligence processes as well as data collection from various sources, can also be automated. This information can be provided in the form of a central report, which can also include an overall scoring of which level of risk is involved with onboarding the client or business. This can serve as material for human analysis.

Simplify Your Attack Surface

Increasing complexity compounds GRC costs. Before you go ahead and set spending limits on security, check if you are reducing complexity in the underlying business and technology environment to make it easier to maintain your systems. Your “attack surface” is the set of locations inside a system or on its external edge where a potential intruder could try to get access. You might be able to eliminate points of entry by deleting superfluous risk-introducing software and technologies through thorough research. 

Monitor and Be Proactive

Cybersecurity compliance is not a one-off process that ensures absolute peace of mind. It’s an ongoing system of identifying vulnerabilities that should never relent. Robust compliance and GRC risk management are nearly impossible without a continuous control monitoring system. Continuous monitoring identifies hidden system components, misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and unauthorized actions. 

Scale as You Go

Your organization doesn’t need to implement GRC initiatives for every department all at once. If you want to boost compliance but worry about the budget, start small and scale up gradually. 

Falling back on your risk-based priorities, focus on your most important GRC initiatives and go down the list in order of importance. Again, GRC platforms allow you to scale your framework as you grow.

Prepare for the Worst

Hoping for the best is nice, but you need to be prepared for the worst. A determined hacker or group will find a way to infiltrate your systems once they have made you a target. Be prepared with a response plan for if and when you are attacked. A well-planned response to a simulated breach can seriously limit the damage imposed by a security incident.

How Can Centraleyes Help You Maintain Your GRC Program?

The Centraleyes automated risk and compliance platform serve as a hub for agile decision-making, helping you cut through layers of security requirements, ensuring higher levels of compliance at a lower cost.. With our powerful risk register, you can easily assess and quantify risk to estimate the severity of your risk exposures and generate actionable insights to guide you through compliance requirements.

As managing compliance increases in complexity and organizations face a never-ending grind of supervisory mandates, resource-strapped businesses will have an even greater need to embrace technology that replaces manual procedures. An automated approach to compliance efforts will provide the consistency, transparency, and security that regulators require and stakeholders demand.

Our automated portal is a fabulous tool to help consolidate multiple efforts and streamline your compliance process. The centralized dashboard simplifies compliance by aligning comparable controls across various employments.