The Need for Proactive GRC (Governance, Risk, Compliance)

Today, businesses must rethink GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) to stay ahead of the game. With a proactive approach, GRC isn’t a cost center; it’s a strategy to streamline innovation at scale. We’ll discuss how to build your foundation for GRC with a proactive stance, helping you grow and protect your business.

The Need for Proactive GRC

When we think of a GRC strategy, the first question we should be asking is: why do we need business resilience? It’s because we need to plan ahead to mitigate business risks, whether it’s related to security, new regulations, geopolitics, or other threats. In our highly competitive business environment, we all want to deliver solutions and services quickly so we have an edge over our competitors. This means that we have to move with efficiency, and sometimes accept certain risks to achieve those goals.

The key challenge is how to balance risk against the need for consistency, predictability, and reliability in delivering a trusted solution to your users, customers, and partners. As they say in the world of security, there is no limit to the amount of money you could spend to secure a solution. But business logic demands that we take a more conservative approach with our investments in people, processes, and tools to enable a statistically safe path for delivering solutions to market.

A GRC Framework

This is where a GRC framework comes into being. It provides a structured approach to manage risks and gives business leaders the information they need to make decisions. This also allows us to meet our regulatory compliance needs.

Traditional GRC practices required us to use a variety of tools to check that audit trails were being generated. We also faced the arduous process of confirming that processes and procedures are being followed.

I’m happy to report that the world has evolved, and vendors now offer a wide range of streamlined, integrated GRC tools. However, a challenge remains. This work is usually done in hindsight, not while activities are actually being performed. We talk about proactive security—why can’t we have proactive GRC?

Proactive GRC in Practice

A proactive approach to GRC helps streamline software development. You could eliminate one of the most painful aspects of GRC (i.e., confirming that processes and procedures were followed to test software before release) by integrating it into your software lifecycle. This would result in a complete activity trail showing how the software progressed from design to production.

I like to refer to this as the genealogy or the life history of a software release. And conveniently enough, this is precisely the information that auditors and regulators are looking for.

Proof, Or It Didn’t Happen

Streamlined Cross-Functional Auditing

Auditors only determine that an application is in compliance when there are attestations that prove adherence to policies. Without proof, they assume non-compliance.

Here are some examples of evidence that auditors and regulators care about:

New AI regulations such as the EU Artificial Intelligence Act also include requirements around data governance, logging, traceability, and human oversight. AI-specific evidence types will be crucial, including data lineage, bias assessments, model versioning, and human-in-the-loop logs.

The ability to capture all this information reliably and efficiently is not trivial, as software supply chains are complex. 64% of organizations polled by JFrog report using 7+ programming languages, consisting of global development teams working with different technologies and packages.

The Foundation: Automated, Trusted Evidence Collection

Given the complexity in modern software supply chains, manual approaches to collect evidence are neither scalable or reliable. Every audit becomes a fire drill searching across multiple locations, frustrating teams, and slowing innovation.

Automated evidence collection, when implemented from the beginning within developer pipelines, sets a foundation to eliminate governance and compliance headaches. Many vendors, from compliance automation providers, DevOps platforms, to ASPM vendors, recognize this, and offer automated evidence capture functionality as part of their holistic offering.

For a more seamless experience, I recommend focusing on solutions that have a complete view of the SDLC, with the full native application context. That way, you can prioritize evidence collection at the start, eliminating potential headaches downstream. To further simplify compliance workstreams, I also recommend adopting a solution that allows you to query evidence from one trusted source, instead of multiple locations.

With an automated approach to collect evidence, you can add policies on top of that evidence, which helps drive automated, end-to-end, and evidence-based governance of your pipelines – executing GRC strategies while keeping developers in their flow.

Proactive GRC as a Strategic Advantage

Meeting Regulations with Evidence Collection

By embracing a proactive GRC framework, supported by automated evidence collection that collects the attestations auditors can trust, GRC can become a competitive advantage, increasing velocity, security, and governance – without compromise. This way, organizations can innovate with confidence while leading responsibly in the AI-powered future.

Need help getting started with a proactive GRC plan? Check out JFrog’s Evidence Collection for our platform-driven, ecosystem-friendly approach to automated evidence capture. To learn more, take a tour or book a demo today!