How to build a robust enterprise GRC program: All you need to know

Updated: June 6, 2025

Published: May 15, 2025

How to build a robust enterprise GRC program: All you need to know

From rapid advancements in AI and automation to increasing regulatory scrutiny and devastating cyberattacks, Enterprise GRC (governance, risk, and compliance), also known as EGRC, is undergoing a significant transformation in 2025.

The numbers say it all: 32% of businesses find near-weekly regulatory shifts as their top concern, whereas only 20% proactively manage compliance issues. In 2024, regulatory fines hit a record amount of $19.3 billion globally.

The solution lies in advanced technology: automated enterprise GRC software. It’s efficient, cost-effective, scalable, and built for speed.

A global compliance survey revealed that 64% of businesses believe compliance technology improves risk visibility, 54% say it accelerates compliance issue resolution, and 43% say it boosts productivity and cost savings.

In this article, we’ll unpack what enterprise GRC really is, why it matters, the execution challenges, and how to implement it with the right enterprise GRC solution for long-term business resilience.

What is enterprise GRC?

Enterprise GRC (or EGRC) stands for Enterprise Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance. It’s a company-wide approach to defining how an organization governs itself, manages business and security risks, and stays compliant with laws and regulations.

In practice, EGRC means putting in place company-wide policies, internal controls, risk assessments, monitoring tools, and clear procedures—so every team, from IT to finance to HR, knows what is expected and stays aligned.

Unlike traditional GRC (where each team handles things in isolation), EGRC connects these efforts under one umbrella, helping companies stay audit-ready and resilient as they grow.

How enterprise GRC differs from traditional GRC

Check out the following comparison of traditional GRC and enterprise GRC:

Aspect	Traditional GRC	Enterprise GRC (EGRC)
What it is	A fragmented approach to governance, risk, and compliance, often managed in silos.	A holistic, integrated approach to GRC, aligning it with the overall business strategy.
How do they work?	Disconnected departments manage GRC activities independently; processes are performed manually, which can lead to redundancy and gaps.	A unified system where GRC is embedded into business operations; streamlined processes, clear visibility across the organization.
Who uses it	Smaller organizations or specific departments within larger organizations.	Larger, more complex organizations with a need for comprehensive, organization-wide GRC.
Why it’s done	Primarily to meet specific regulatory requirements or address immediate risks.	To achieve strategic objectives, improve performance, manage risk across the enterprise, and ensure long-term sustainability.
How it’s run	Often manual, using spreadsheets, paperwork, and ad-hoc processes.	Technology-driven, using integrated GRC platforms to automate processes, centralize data, and improve efficiency.
Ownership	Distributed across different departments (e.g., Legal for compliance, IT for IT risk).	Centralized ownership, often with a dedicated GRC function or executive, promotes accountability.
Tech stack	Limited or no dedicated technology; reliance on spreadsheets, shared drives, and point solutions.	Integrated GRC platforms with features like risk assessment, compliance management, audit management, and reporting, often leveraging automation, AI, and data analytics.
Compliance approach	Reactive, focused on meeting specific regulatory requirements after they arise.	Proactive, aiming to embed compliance into business processes and anticipate future regulatory changes.
Risk approach	Siloed risk management, with each department managing its own risks with limited coordination.	Integrated risk management provides a holistic view of all risks across the organization and their potential impact on strategic objectives.
Culture impact	Can lead to a “check-the-box” mentality towards compliance, with limited awareness of overall GRC objectives.	Encourages a culture of ethics, accountability, and risk awareness throughout the organization.
Audit readiness	Can be challenging and time-consuming due to fragmented data and manual processes.	Streamlined and efficient, with centralized data and automated reporting facilitating easier audits.
Adaptability	Limited ability to adapt to changing business conditions or new regulations.	Agile and adaptable, enabling organizations to respond quickly to new risks and regulatory requirements.
Scalability	Difficult to scale as the organization grows or becomes more complex.	Designed to scale with the organization, accommodating increasing complexity and data volumes.
Reporting	Inconsistent and fragmented reporting makes it difficult to get a clear picture of the organization’s overall GRC posture.	Centralized, real-time reporting provides a comprehensive view of GRC performance and key metrics.
Vendor/Third-Party Management	Often handled in a decentralized manner with varying levels of rigor.	Centralized and standardized approach to managing vendor and third-party risks, ensuring consistent due diligence and monitoring.
Use case	Suitable for: Small businesses with simple structures Department within a larger company.	Best for large and complex enterprises with diverse operations, multiple locations, and complex regulatory requirements.

Why is enterprise GRC important?

The components of GRC—governance, risk, and compliance— aren’t isolated functions; they work in a continuous, reinforcing loop:

While governance defines the policies and sets the expectations for operating in a certain manner, risk management identifies where things could go wrong, while compliance ensures teams are actually following the rules.

Each feeds into the next. And when something breaks—like a policy fails or a risk materializes—the loop brings it back to governance to adjust course.

That’s why enterprise GRC is critical. It weaves together these three components into a cohesive strategy that supports all departments, enabling organization-wide resilience and sustainable growth.

Let’s break down the key reasons to adopt enterprise GRC:

1. Continuous regulatory adherence

When market growth is one of your major goals, trying to keep up with new and changing laws that change fast—DORA in the EU, HIPAA in the US, and AI governance frameworks— is a critical priority. An EGRC system ensures you meet evolving legal requirements across regions and always stay compliant, avoiding costly penalties and growth roadblocks.

2. Real-time risk visibility

Enterprise GRC solutions utilize advanced technology to continuously monitor data security risks, with simplified workflows for identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks.

It’s required because, according to the World Economic Forum’s 2025 report, 72% of businesses mention that cyber risks have skyrocketed. On the other hand, 47% report adversaries using GenAI as their top concern due to its ability to launch large-scale and sophisticated attacks.

3. Faser audit readiness and seamless reporting

Several industries, including finance, healthcare, energy, and IT, are heavily regulated and require compliance with multiple industry-specific frameworks. That’s where enterprise GRC software saves the day. It centralizes compliance management, automates risk monitoring, streamlines report generation, and ensures you’re always audit-ready.

Without a robust enterprise GRC solution, businesses may face increased complexity, data silos, inefficient manual processes, missed regulatory updates, audit fatigue, and even expensive audit failures.

4. Promoting collaboration and proactive decision-making

Unifying GRC processes removes silos and improves visibility across the organization. Executives gain a holistic view of risk and compliance, enabling them to make smarter, faster decisions.

Enterprise GRC tools leverage data analytics to generate actionable insights. These insights drive resource optimization, faster remediation, and strategic alignment of GRC activities with business goals.

Ultimately, enterprise GRC transforms the function from a reactive, compliance-driven function to a proactive, strategic business enabler.

5. Scalability to grow with your business

As your organization expands into new markets, introduces new products, or acquires other companies, your employee count skyrockets, which requires better and faster GRC workflows.

An EGRC system provides the scalability to adapt to this growth, incorporating new regulations, risks, and compliance requirements without disrupting operations. This future-proof approach helps build trust when entering new markets, allowing you to pursue growth opportunities with confidence and avoid the limitations of fragmented, legacy systems.

Core components of an enterprise GRC framework

Effectively handling governance, risk, and compliance is crucial for avoiding problems, mitigating threats, and staying compliant while achieving your business goals.

Modern enterprise GRC software enables a holistic, scalable strategy for strong governance, proactive risk mitigation, and regulatory compliance across the organization.

Let’s see how:

1. Governance

Governance is the set of rules, policies, and procedures that enterprises establish to achieve their objectives. It determines who has authority, who is accountable, and how decisions are made.

Good governance includes aligning business activities with strategic goals and ethical practices, defining roles and responsibilities, and ensuring internal controls effectively follow external regulations.

Here’s how enterprise GRC software enables good governance:

Centralizes policy creation and distribution with customization options and version control.
Provides role-based access controls to define and enforce authority and responsibility, along with user access reviews.
Includes customizable dashboards to monitor policy adherence, access control effectiveness, etc.
Automates workflows for policy approvals, task assigning, and tracking.

2. Enterprise risk management

This GRC component involves identifying, assessing, and mitigating potential business risks. Doing so proactively minimizes the adverse impact of operational disruptions, economic downturns, breaches, compliance violations, and third-party issues.

Here’s how an enterprise GRC solution simplifies enterprise risk management:

Automates risk assessments with recommended mitigation plans.
Simplifies workflows to assign mitigation tasks, with auto-alerts and progress tracking.
Provides real-time risk monitoring of key risk indicators.
Includes risk dashboards with visualizations for trends, critical risk alerts, etc.

3. Compliance

Compliance in GRC refers to adhering to internal policies, industry standards, and laws and directives imposed by external regulatory bodies. This ensures your business operates lawfully and ethically, avoiding legal penalties, protecting its brand reputation, and maintaining trust with stakeholders.

You can achieve compliance by aligning your operations and internal controls with the requirements of popular compliance frameworks, such as HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI DSS, training your employees, and conducting regular compliance audits.

Here’s how enterprise GRC tools streamline regulatory compliance and audits:

Continuously monitor controls with alerts, identify gaps, suggest remediation steps, and track progress.
Centralize access to compliance documents, improving collaboration among cross-functional teams and enhancing decision-making.
Automatically collect evidence through integrations and map controls to multiple frameworks, reducing redundancy and streamlining audits.
Enable customizable reporting to demonstrate compliance status to various stakeholders.
Provide dedicated compliance and audit dashboards to accelerate compliance and audit readiness.

Common challenges in enterprise GRC implementation

Although enterprise GRC is the need of the hour with numerous advantages, implementing it comes with a few challenges:

1. Siloed GRC management

Information about governance, risk management, and compliance is often scattered across different departments and systems, making it difficult to get a holistic view.

This leads to poor collaboration, slow decision-making, and ineffective use of the GRC framework. A centralized enterprise GRC structure can eliminate these silos and unify all GRC data in a single place, enabling company-wide visibility and enhanced decision-making.

2. Costly and complex traditional GRC

Outdated GRC systems are too expensive to maintain due to cost-intensive manual processes, potential fines caused by compliance errors, and increased costs in gathering scattered audit data.

Additionally, siloed data brings added complexities, such as manual control mapping across frameworks, version control issues, tedious compliance monitoring, delayed reporting, and increased struggles with audit preparation. A technology-driven enterprise GRC solution can help overcome these challenges in a cost-efficient and streamlined way.

3. Lack of automation and real-time tracking

Continuous issue monitoring is the backbone of effective GRC systems. Without leveraging technology, these tasks must be done manually, making them tedious and prone to errors. This can lead to undetected risks, delayed remediation, audit failures, and regulatory penalties.

Modern enterprise GRC tools, on the other hand, automate continuous monitoring and gap remediation workflows with real-time alerts, streamlining compliance and accelerating audit readiness.

4. Difficulty integrating GRC with existing security tools

Traditional GRC approaches often struggle to integrate with existing security tools like security information and event management (SIEMs) tools, vulnerability scanners, and identity and access management tools (IAMs). This results in silos, fragmented workflows, and poor visibility, hindering businesses’ ability to correlate security data with GRC activities and assess its impact on the overall GRC posture.

Automated enterprise GRC software overcomes this problem by providing pre-built integrations and APIs to connect with more than security tools, unifying GRC processes, and improving visibility.

Tips for effective GRC implementation

Following the best practices provided below will help you overcome the challenges of implementing a GRC program:

1. Establish clear GRC objectives and scope

Defining clear GRC goals (e.g., reducing risk, ensuring compliance, or enhancing efficiency) aligned with broader business objectives is the first step toward successful GRC implementation.

Create a GRC roadmap that includes objectives, clear roles and responsibilities, success metrics, technology solutions, timelines, and key milestones.

Appoint a GRC director or identify key stakeholders (e.g., executives, department heads, IT, HR, legal, finance) whose responsibilities are clearly outlined and documented. For instance, board-level executives review and authorize the enterprise GRC program, while department heads ensure that it is effectively executed within their domains.

Break the GRC project into small, manageable phases, prioritizing the most critical areas for improvement.

2. Secure executive buy-in

Since enterprise GRC involves an extensive transformation across all organizational levels, strong support from senior management is essential to ensure adequate resource allocation and commitment.

Present the concrete benefits of enterprise GRC solutions in terms of ROI to board-level executives (e.g., minimized risks, reduced costs, improved credibility, competitive advantage).

Demonstrate how well GRC activities align with the overall business objectives and stakeholder requirements. For instance, CFOs might be interested in knowing how enterprise GRC reduces financial risks and improves reporting accuracy, while CIOs may want to know how it enhances data security and protects IT systems.

3. Choose the right enterprise GRC software

Leveraging modern, user-friendly enterprise GRC software is crucial. Choose a tool with a comprehensive set of features that can be tailored to your organization’s needs at an affordable cost.

Thoroughly evaluate leading enterprise GRC tools and pick one that can be customized, automates repetitive GRC processes, is intuitive to use, scales with your needs, and integrates with your existing systems.

Look for essential features such as:

Automated control testing and security control monitoring.
Automated compliance workflows and compliance tracking.
Enterprise and vendor risk management with mitigation workflows.
Policy building with customizable features and version control.
Automated evidence collection via integrations.
Real-time and audit-ready report generation.
Streamlined cross-department collaboration on a unified platform.

4. Proactively manage change and train personnel

Resistance to change can hinder the effective execution of GRC. People are often slow to adopt new workflows and technologies.

Because enterprise GRC affects everyone, clearly communicate upcoming changes in GRC implementation and their impact to everyone. Ensure personnel are properly trained on their enterprise GRC responsibilities and know how to use enterprise GRC software.

Why Scrut is the best enterprise GRC solution in 2025

Looking to move beyond your legacy GRC system? One of the most important steps is choosing the right enterprise GRC platform.

While there are many tools available, Scrut stands out with its next-gen enterprise GRC platform that automates and simplifies governance, risk, and compliance processes.

Scrut helps businesses stay compliant with various industry frameworks by using automated GRC workflows, real-time risk assessment, continuous compliance monitoring, streamlined policy management, and integrations with a wide range of third-party applications, while minimizing operational complexities.

Scrut’s smartGRC platform is built to make enterprise GRC simple, scalable, and effective, with customizable features, including:

Unified GRC platform: Manage all GRC workflows via one tool alongside audit support.
Compliance management: Automate compliance workflows and map controls to 50+ out-of-the-box frameworks, along with support for custom ones.
Policy management: Access 75+ pre-built policy templates to quickly get started with GRC. Use the built-in policy editor to create and update policies with version control.
Evidence management: Automatically collect evidence across integrations. Scrut’s platform maps every piece of evidence to framework requirements.
Security control monitoring: Gain access to 1400+ unified controls pre-mapped across 50+ frameworks. Scrut’s automated tests ensure that controls are continuously monitored in real time.
Compliance dashboard and reporting: Get quick insights into compliance progress and status of risks, vendor assessment, at-risk employees, and ongoing audits. Scrut allows you to access audit trails and a central evidence repository, streamlining and accelerating the audit process.
Risk management: Perform end-to-end risk assessment, from discovery and assessment to mitigation and tracking status. Use the extensive risk register with customizable scoring mechanisms.
Vendor management: Quickly onboard vendors, store their risk profiles in a central hub, and use custom questionnaires to thoroughly assess vendors. Scrut offers a dedicated vendor portal to track questionnaire completion status, flag risks, and send mitigation alerts.
Collaborative workflows: Easily share compliance artifacts among team members, auditors, and pen-testers. Scrut allows you to add comments and tag relevant stakeholders for responding to audit findings and evidence requests.

Not only that, Scrut also provides white-glove support from expert GRC professionals to help your teams implement an effective GRC program that enables you to: