What Do We Actually Build When We Build GRC

When someone asks what I do at LockThreat, the short answer is easy – I work on a GRC product(GRC stands for Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance).

The honest answer takes a little longer.

Most businesses/organizations make promises every day. They promise customers their data will be protected. They promise employees a safe and fair workplace. They promise regulators/law enforcers they will follow the rules. They promise their leadership that they understand the risks when they are trusted with responsibility.

Making promises is easy. Keeping one or two promises is usually easy too. The problem starts when promises repeat, pile up, and compete with each other.

Think about everyday life. You promise to:

·  Take out the bins every Tuesday night.

·  Call family every Sunday.

·  Help around the house, show up on time, and do things a certain way.

Most weeks, you mean it and actually do it. Some weeks, life gets in the way. Nothing dramatic happens. You just forget. You get busy. Something else feels more urgent.

Promises at a Company Level

Now imagine managing hundreds or thousands of those promises, across thousands, or tens of thousands of people and customers, every week. That is what organizations deal with. In a company, promises look like this:

·  We review access every quarter

·  We encrypt sensitive data

·  We prevent sensitive data – company, employees, and customers – from reaching unauthorized people or systems (including unauthorized AI)

·  We follow this regulation and that regulation

·  We train employees every year

Individually, most of these are not hard. They become hard when they repeat, when people change roles, when teams grow, and when no one is reminded or checked.

That is when good intentions start to fail, and this is where GRC comes in.

The Open Compliance and Ethics Group organization (OCEG) talks about Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity (VUCA). They say that GRC exists as a framework to reduce the issues caused by VUCA (or the obstacles you face when trying to uphold promises “at scale”).

So, What is GRC?

At its simplest form, GRC is about three things – Rules, Responsibilities, Proof.

·  Rules tell you what is expected.

·  Responsibilities tell you who owns what.

·  Proof shows that what was promised actually happened.

Without these three things, organizations rely on memory, good intentions, and hope. That may sometimes work when a company is small. It always breaks the moment the company grows, moves fast, or comes under pressure.

Here is a simple example. A company says it takes privacy seriously. Everyone agrees. Everyone means well. But then people leave, teams change, new systems are added.

Then an audit happens. Or a customer asks a hard question. If the answers live only in someone’s head, or in a document nobody checks, then the promise falls apart. Not because people are bad or have malicious intent, but because the system is weak.

GRC exists to make responsibility real, not assumed. This is why software matters.

You can talk about responsibilities all day. But if these responsibilities are not written clearly, assigned to real people, tracked over time, and backed by evidence, they disappear when it matters most.

Here’s What Real GRC Looks Like

At LockThreat, we talk a lot about a “source of truth”, which is a real need in any process.

We can use a source of truth at home. For example, which categories of items are kept on which shelf in the fridge. My mother, for example, must have the dairy products placed on the first (top) shelf, meat and miscellaneous on the second and third shelves, and veggies in the drawer(s) at the bottom of the fridge. This is our house ‘policy’.

However, some family members (like me…) aren’t always compliant; we may take things out of the fridge and put them back onto the ‘wrong’ shelf. If we had a display on the front of the fridge (i.e. ‘control’) that actually showed this requirement, maybe the family would have been compliant. The risk, in this case, is annoying my mother… and believe me, that’s not a risk you want to take!

In the enterprise world, software helps organizations to ‘remember’. It’s how organizations stay consistent when things get busy. GRC software is used to avoid surprises that hurt customers, employees, and the business itself.

This is also why selling a GRC product is not just selling software. In reality, we sell clarity. We help organizations answer simple yet important questions, such as:

·  Do we know where our risks are?

·  Do we know who owns each risk?

·  Do we know what is working and what is not?

·  Do we know what to fix next? And if we must fix multiple things, then what is the priority?

The challenge is that in many organizations, maybe most – leadership cannot provide good answers to such questions. That is also when things fall down and issues occur; and such issues can lead to data leaks from inside the organization (intentional or not); to hackers infiltrating into the organization; to failing regulatory audits which can result in fines and even criminal proceedings; and more.

When leaders can answer such questions with confidence, everything changes. Decisions are made faster, fear goes down, blame goes down, and focus goes up.

This is why our mission at LockThreat is “Turning Compliance Into Delightful Confidence”. It is not ‘delight’ in the sense of ‘fun’, but rather delight in the sense of ‘relief’. It’s the relief of knowing where you really stand, the relief of not guessing, and the relief of being prepared instead of being reactive.

The Importance of GRC

Why does this matter beyond business? It’s because organizations affect real people. Hospitals handle patient data, banks handle life savings, governments handle public trust, and tech companies shape how people live and work.

Family life is peaceful when we care about the rules set within the family; peace of mind is important for a home to be a place of rest.

When organizations fail at their responsibilities, people feel it – sometimes quietly, sometimes painfully.

Nothing dramatic happens when organizations perform their responsibilities well. This is an important point to remember. Harm is avoided, trust is kept, and life continues normally. That kind of impact is easy to miss because it is invisible when everything works well.

You’re only grateful for your GRC tool when you realize that you saved your organization from a threat such as a lawsuit, a vendor who fails to meet compliance, a workforce that is victim to a cyberattack, HR that had to deal with ethics violation, and the list of risks goes on and on.

So why do I work at LockThreat?

Because this work trains me to think clearly about responsibility. It forces me to connect rules to real actions, and it makes me respect consequences instead of ignoring them.

No matter the role each of us plays at LockThreat – product, engineering, sales, marketing, customer experience – we are all part of the same mission of helping organizations keep their promises.

This may not sound flashy, but it is human; and when it is missing, the damage is very real and can hit the enterprise’s bank account and people’s lives really hard. It’s much more ‘affordable’ to invest in a great GRC tool, than to pay significantly more $$$ on damage control, regulatory fines, and damage to the organization’s reputation.

This is why GRC exists, and why GRC software exists.

It is why the work we do here at LockThreat matters.