GRC, The Challenge

Organizations today are facing increased risk and regulatory pressures. Risk management, compliance and governance reforms that followed the corporate failures of the past decade have dramatically changed today's business environment. Organizations worldwide are coping with a proliferation of new regulations and standards, and are challenged to do so in a way that supports performance objectives, upholds stakeholder expectations, sustains value and protects the organization's brand.

Recent studies indicate that Fortune 1000 corporations are subject to 35-40 different regulatory mandates and the management of regulation and compliance has become a serious risk factor in itself. Complying with each individual regulation is always complicated, lengthy and costly. Managing the burden of complying with multiple and overlapping regulations is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive.

To address these issues, organizations have invested in multiple risk and compliance initiatives, with little coordination between different units such as: Internal Audit, Risk Management, Compliance, IT Compliance and more. Working in silos causes a substantial amount of duplicated control activities which results in high cost and inefficiency. The lack of consistent methodology among the multiple GRC initiatives causes limited visibility at upper management and board levels. Executive management is unable to obtain a comprehensive view of risk and compliance.

The need for GRC convergence in today's business environment is obvious. Organizations need a centralized software platform for collaborating and sharing information. The GRC software is the technological heart of an integrated GRC architecture. It provides an infrastructure for modeling, documenting, testing, assessing and maintaining GRC.