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As we approach the end of the Cybersecurity Awareness Month, it’s important to emphasize that while awareness is a crucial first step, it is not enough to tackle today’s sophisticated and evolving threats. Cyber resilience requires translating awareness into action by fostering a proactive culture, adopting the right attitude towards risk, and equipping organizations with effective tools. It’s not just about knowing the risks; it’s about embedding that knowledge into every layer of the organization and ensuring that cybersecurity becomes a shared responsibility.
Achieving true resilience demands the seamless integration of cybersecurity within a comprehensive Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (GRC) framework. This approach transcends mere compliance, encouraging a continual assessment of risks and vulnerabilities. By adopting a unified GRC platform, organizations can centralize risk data, streamline compliance, and maintain real-time oversight. Cultivating a culture of awareness and providing teams with the right tools are essential in translating awareness into action. It’s about fostering a proactive mindset throughout the organization, ensuring cybersecurity is not a one-time effort, but a sustained, strategic priority. In doing so, risk management becomes an integral part of business strategy, enabling organizations to remain resilient and prepared in an increasingly complex threat landscape.
Moving beyond compliance-driven cybersecurity
Primary cybersecurity objectives are aligned with the Network & Information Security Directive (NIS2), the EU Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), and other industry-specific regulations. However, these standards often represent the bare minimum and leave organizations vulnerable to emerging threats that compliance frameworks may not fully address. In fact, authentic cyber resilience goes beyond a compliance checklist. It involves creating a proactive risk management culture where security is embedded across the organization. When cybersecurity aligns with GRC, businesses can adopt a comprehensive approach that continuously evaluates risks and mitigates them before they escalate. This shift from reactive compliance to proactive risk management enhances overall security, ensuring organizations remain resilient against evolving threats. As a result, GRC systems should be viewed as the backbone of organizational resilience, supporting both proactive risk management and responsive security strategies.
The role of IT in enabling GRC integration
GRC and cybersecurity must not exist in separate silos. While GRC frameworks establish the governance and policies for risk management, IT provides the tools and infrastructure needed to enforce those policies across the organization. This interdependency highlights the need for a collaborative approach, where IT and risk management work in tandem to achieve security objectives. However, this relationship is more than just the implementation of IT controls or the use of security tools. The real value of GRC lies in its ability to inform decision-making at all levels, ensuring that risks are not only identified but also mitigated through actionable insights. This is where IT’s role becomes vital—not just in monitoring and defending against threats but also in providing the real-time data needed for informed, proactive risk management. By integrating GRC into the IT environment, organizations can automate compliance, streamline governance processes, and centralize risk data. This allows for a more agile response to emerging threats, where risks are continuously assessed and mitigated before they can escalate into full-blown crises.
Managing third-party risks with confidence
Third-party vendors and suppliers are often key entry points for cybercriminals, as breaches in the supply chain can have devastating ripple effects across organizations. According to recent studies, 61% of data breaches involve third-party vendors. Managing these risks is increasingly crucial as businesses become more reliant on external partners.
Integrating GRC into cybersecurity simplifies the management of third-party risks by providing a centralized system to assess, monitor, and manage vendor relationships. Key benefits of GRC integration include:
- Taxonomy framework: Managing third-party risks requires transparency about vulnerabilities, cross-organizational dependencies, subprocesses, and third-party involvement. A comprehensive taxonomy framework helps organizations identify and mitigate risks tied to external partners.
- Automated vendor assessments: GRC platforms automate the risk assessment process for vendors, ensuring that they meet necessary cybersecurity standards.
- Continuous monitoring: Businesses can continuously monitor third-party compliance and address any vulnerabilities before they lead to a breach.
This streamlined approach helps mitigate supply chain risks, ensuring that external partners don’t compromise internal security.
Turning awareness into action with Swiss GRC’s solutions
Contrary to the common belief that cyber resilience can be achieved through a single solution or module, true resilience requires a comprehensive, integrated system of well-structured organizational processes. It involves embedding proactive risk management across the entire organization. At Swiss GRC, we offer a holistic approach by integrating key disciplines such as Risk Management, Internal Controls (ICS), Information Security (ISMS), Data Protection, Business Continuity Management (BCM), and Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) into a robust, organization-wide solution.
This graphic highlights key modules within the GRC Toolbox, showcasing a selection of tools offered by Swiss GRC to enhance governance, manage risks, and ensure compliance—for a resilient and sustainable organization.
Achieving operational resilience, as outlined by standards like DORA and NIS2, demands more than isolated measures. It requires a consistent identification and classification of critical processes and functions across the organization. By providing the necessary transparency—spanning risk exposures, cross-organizational dependencies, subprocesses, and third parties—Swiss GRC’s solutions help businesses implement a comprehensive taxonomy framework that ensures a clear understanding of risks, vulnerabilities, and assets.
Starting with these classifications and inventories, an organization can better assess the protection needs related to critical processes and related assets along the typical ISMS protection object categories: authenticity, confidentiality, integrity, availability, and traceability. Based on this, an organization can assure either adherence with minimal standard defined or conduct more comprehensive Cyber Security Maturity Analysis and calculate the corresponding ratings along the lines of the five 5 Cyber Security framework functions: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond and Recover. From the Data Protection perspective the categorization and classification of data and persons, processing activities, and recipients allows for a comprehensive Data Protection Impact Assessment, which belongs to a unified and integrated Risk Management view. In this context, Business Continuity Management (BCM) is indispensable, ensuring that organizations not only bounce back from adverse events but also emerge stronger and more resilient. Regular Business Impact Analyses (BIAs) define criticality through key indicators like Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption and Recovery Time Objectives, preparing organizations for a well-structured response to any crisis.
Moreover, resilience is about taking a proactive stance. Organizations must identify risks and vulnerabilities before they materialize. Swiss GRC’s solutions support real-time cyber monitoring and proactive management, empowering businesses to prevent incidents rather than simply reacting to them. By embedding these best practices into a unified and integrated GRC system, organizations can ensure they remain resilient, adaptable, and prepared in today’s increasingly complex threat landscape.
Cyber resilience, as Swiss GRC demonstrates, involves the seamless integration of various GRC disciplines, ensuring that risks are continuously identified, assessed, and mitigated within a consistent and unified framework. In this way, GRC becomes not only a safeguard but also a strategic enabler of long-term resilience.
Contact us today to learn how our solutions can help your business move from cyber awareness to meaningful action.
Authors: Bujar Surdulli (Swiss GRC), Nikolai Tsenov (Swiss GRC), October 2024
