Upcoming webinar: "ReCyF and ISO 27001: Where to Start Without Starting from Scratch" — Friday, September 4, at 2:00 p.m.
Sign up
%20_%20-%20blog.png)
A CISO who manages cybersecurity in a silo, a DPO who handles GDPR compliance without tying it to corporate strategy, a Risk Manager who discovers a risk only after the fact: these compartmentalized situations are costly, both in terms of time and credibility. GRC specifically addresses this problem by unifying governance, risk management, and compliance into an integrated approach.
This article provides a clear definition of GRC, its fundamental pillars, its relationship to cybersecurity, and a practical method for structuring your approach.
GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) refers to the integrated set of capabilities that enable an organization to reliably achieve its objectives, manage uncertainty, and act with integrity. The term was first formalized by the Open Compliance and Ethics Group (OCEG), which began using it as early as 2002, before its founder, Scott Mitchell, published the first academic article on the subject in 2007 in the International Journal of Disclosure and Governance. Prior to this formalization, companies managed governance, risk, and compliance in a fragmented manner, leading to redundancies and blind spots.
This fragmented approach remains the main obstacle observed today: three separate teams (legal, security, and internal audit) often produce different risk maps for the same scope due to the lack of a common framework. The promise of GRC is precisely to align these perspectives through a shared language and set of tools, reducing duplication and improving the speed of decision-making in the face of an incident or a new regulatory requirement.
Governance refers to the structures, policies, and processes that guide how a company is managed and controlled, ranging from internal rules to the division of responsibilities among teams. In France, a société anonyme (SA) has a formal board of directors, while a SAS has a more flexible organizational structure.
In practical terms, a mature GRC governance framework involves dedicated committees (risk committee, compliance committee), clear reporting channels to senior management and the board of directors, as well as formalized and regularly updated internal policies. Without this decision-making structure, even the best risk mapping remains ineffective due to the lack of a hierarchical channel to act on it.
Risk management is based on a four-step process: identifying potential risks through audits and scenario analyses, assessing their probability and impact, defining mitigation strategies (reduction, transfer, acceptance), and then continuously monitoring them using key risk indicators. This approach applies equally to IT risks—which many companies consider a priority due to the risk of systemic failure—as well as to risks related to the supply chain or geopolitics.
Impact assessment should not be limited to direct financial risk: a major cyber incident can also lead to a cascade of non-compliance risks (such as a GDPR violation resulting from a data breach), reputational risk, and operational risk if critical systems are unavailable. It is this multidimensional perspective that distinguishes mature risk management from a simple security checklist.
Compliance encompasses the legal, regulatory, and industry-specific obligations that a company must meet in order to conduct its business. This pillar is covered in detail in our article on corporate regulatory compliance, which addresses, among other topics, the GDPR, NIS2, and DORA.
In a GRC framework, compliance should not be treated as a standalone checkbox item: it is directly linked to the other two pillars. An identified regulatory requirement (such as NIS2) gives rise to new risks that must be mapped, which in turn require a governance structure capable of prioritizing the investments needed to address them within the specified timeframes.
The European regulatory landscape has become increasingly complex at an unprecedented pace. NIS2 is being implemented more rapidly across Member States, with strengthened cybersecurity requirements for critical and significant entities. DORA requires the financial sector to rigorously manage digital resilience, while the AI Act ( EU Regulation 2024/1689) now governs the use of artificial intelligence, with penalties of up to 35 million euros or 7% of global revenue. These four pieces of legislation will converge in 2026 to present a common regulatory challenge for European companies, including SMEs.
At the same time, audits of clients and partners are on the rise: ISO 27001, HDS, SOC 2, and SecNumCloud have become virtually mandatory in B2B tenders, particularly in the healthcare, finance, and public sectors.
This regulatory convergence creates a cumulative effect that companies rarely anticipate: a mid-sized company in the financial sector may thus find itself simultaneously subject to DORA, the GDPR, and NIS2 (if it is classified as a significant entity) and required to demonstrate its ISO 27001 compliance to its banking partners. Without a unified GRC approach, each regulation is handled in isolation by a different team, leading to increased costs and inconsistencies in documentation.
Cybersecurity is now at the heart of any mature GRC approach. Many organizations combine several frameworks to cover this area: the COSO ERM framework to structure enterprise risk governance, ISO 31000 for adaptive risk management processes, and the NIST CSF specifically to address cyber risks. This hybrid approach allows organizations to leverage the strengths of each framework while adapting it to the European regulatory context, where NIS2 and DORA now impose direct obligations to report incidents and map critical systems.
In practical terms, the integration of GRC and cybersecurity translates into three priority areas for CISOs: mapping critical assets and their dependencies (required by NIS2), implementing an incident reporting process that complies with regulatory deadlines (generally 24 to 72 hours, depending on the regulation), and integrating cyber risk into dashboards for senior management, so that security investment decisions are made with a business perspective in mind—not just a technical one.
Concrete examples by sector:
The choice of standards to adopt depends directly on the industry and the maturity of the organization. An SME in the exploratory phase will generally opt for ISO 31000 as a general methodological foundation, before adding industry-specific standards as it grows and its regulatory exposure increases.
Before developing a new approach, it is necessary to assess the maturity of current governance, risk management, and compliance processes: Are risks identified informally, or is there already a structure in place with assigned responsibilities? This initial assessment should also identify the tools already in use (spreadsheets, standalone business applications) to avoid redundancies when selecting a GRC solution.
This step involves formalizing objectives, assigning responsibilities, and mapping the compliance requirements applicable to the organization. It is recommended to prioritize this scope based on risk level and regulatory urgency, rather than aiming for exhaustive coverage from the outset.
The goal is to clearly define decision-making bodies, reporting channels, and the division of roles among the CISO, DPO, Risk Manager, and senior management. A GRC steering committee, which brings these stakeholders together on a quarterly basis, ensures consistent oversight and prevents each function from addressing its issues in isolation.
GRC software allows you to centralize documentation, automate controls, and ensure reliable reporting, rather than managing these processes using scattered files. This standardization becomes essential as soon as the number of regulated frameworks being monitored exceeds two or three, at which point manual monitoring becomes a source of errors and a disproportionate waste of time.
The GRC framework must be reviewed regularly to verify the effectiveness of controls and the appropriateness of objectives in light of an ever-changing regulatory environment. Simple metrics (coverage rate for identified risks, time taken to resolve non-compliance issues, number of incidents detected) are often sufficient to objectively measure this continuous improvement without unduly complicating the management process.
GRC software centralizes risk mapping, regulatory compliance tracking, and the generation of audit evidence within a single tool, replacing spreadsheets and manual processes that are scattered across teams. This centralization becomes particularly valuable in light of the growing number of standards (NIS2, DORA, ISO 27001, HDS) that require continuous rather than one-time traceability.
In light of the growing complexity of European regulations, Oversecur supports businesses with a GRC solution designed specifically to meet the requirements of the GDPR, NIS2, DORA, and sector-specific standards (HDS, SecNumCloud). Discover the Oversecur GRC solution and contact our experts to develop your GRC strategy.
Responsibility at the RCMP is generally shared between senior management, which sets the strategic vision, and operational functions such as the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), the Data Protection Officer (DPO), and the Risk Manager, each of whom covers a specific area while collaborating on cross-functional issues.
The timeframe varies depending on the size of the company and its initial maturity, but an initial mapping and structuring of governance can generally be completed within a few months, followed by a gradual rollout using dedicated tools.
GRC software is not always essential for a small organization with limited compliance obligations, but it quickly becomes relevant once the company is subject to multiple standards simultaneously (NIS2, ISO 27001, GDPR) or must demonstrate compliance during regular client audits.
Have a question? Need help planning a project? Let's talk
Talk to an expert →%20_%20-%20Thumbnail.png)
