Your Guide To GRC Roles and Responsibilities

A successful governance, risk, and compliance framework hinges on having clearly defined roles and responsibilities, which are crucial for avoiding critical failures. Otherwise, GRC is simply words on paper. Astoundingly, one-third of enterprises don’t have anyone assigned to the chief risk officer role, and two-thirds admit to having an understaffed IT department. Does your organization have the most important GRC roles covered?

What GRC Roles Does Your Organization Need?

Effectively implementing governance, risk, and compliance usually requires a team with capable leaders in different areas. GRC frameworks require six main roles.

1. GRC Officer

Every enterprise should have a dedicated position for GRC implementation and monitoring. The GRC officer is responsible for coordinating policy, risk, and compliance processes throughout your organization.

This business professional needs to have extensive experience in GRC management as well as sufficient authority to enforce compliance across the board. The GRC officer usually works closely with the chief risk officer and risk analysts. 

2. Senior Executives

For GRC policies to have “teeth,” they need executive backing. In corporations, GRC compliance starts with the board of directors. Other enterprises place GRC decision-making in the hands of the chief financial officer, chief risk officer, or CEO.

C-suite executives are responsible for setting the organization’s GRC strategy and creating risk and compliance policies.

3. IT and Cybersecurity Professionals

There are countless types of risk that modern organizations need to consider — from employee safety to supply chains — but these days, GRC is closely related to information security and cybersecurity risks. The main responsibility for data security and cyberattack mitigation strategies falls to the chief information security officer. CISOs oversee a complete team of IT and network security consultants, analysts, and technicians.

4. Compliance Experts

Large enterprises and organizations that deal with complex regulatory requirements should have a chief compliance officer. As the name suggests, this vital GRC role involves overseeing all compliance tasks:

• Performing an analysis to identify the organization’s regulatory scope
• Mapping all compliance requirements for company processes
• Staying up to date with industry and regulatory changes
• Performing audits
• Tracking organizational compliance and GRC progress
• Recommending ways to increase and streamline compliance

Compliance is also important for small-to-medium businesses with fewer regulatory requirements, but the compliance officer role in these companies may be handled by the GRC officer or third-party compliance specialists.

5. Operations Managers and Department Leaders

Complying with information security best practices is challenging for companies of every size, especially because of the risk of human error. It only takes a few employee errors to put a vast amount of confidential data at risk.

For this reason, GRC roles should extend all the way to day-to-day personnel, such as operations managers, department heads, and team leaders. These professionals are responsible for ensuring that individual employees get the training necessary to follow data security best practices and meet regulatory standards.

6. Legal Professionals

There is always a legal side to policy creation, risk analysis, and compliance requirements. Consulting with in-house attorneys or corporate law firms is a must before finalizing GRC policies.

Large enterprises often name a data protection officer to coordinate the legal aspects of compliance, from GDPR to SOX. Attorneys coordinate with IT professionals and departmental stakeholders to craft compliant privacy policies, document retention policies, and vendor agreements.

Why Are GRC Roles Important?

Just one look at many data breaches and it’s easy to see why GRC roles are a wise investment. Take 2024’s massive Change Healthcare data breach as an example. This breach happened because of governance, risk, and compliance failures on multiple levels:

• Hackers were able to steal an employee’s credentials, suggesting a lack of email security policies and anti-phishing training.
• The portal where critical data was stored didn’t have multi-factor authentication protections — a striking data security failure and HIPAA violation.
• Once inside, hackers easily spread throughout the network, revealing a lack of data segmentation or network monitoring.
• Change Healthcare was forced to pay a sizable ransom to recover data, indicating poor data backup and breach mitigation practices.

These failures happened despite Change Healthcare generating nearly $100 billion in revenue in Q1 2024 alone, which suggests that these data security failures were the result of poor governance, not a lack of resources. With qualified GRC roles and responsibilities, this breach either wouldn’t have occurred or wouldn’t have spread as far as it did.

How Should You Structure GRC Roles and Responsibilities?

GRC isn’t just for global brands. Policy management, risk management, and compliance monitoring are something companies of every size can and should implement. There are several ways to structure GRC roles.

Distributed GRC Management

Distributed GRC roles entrust management responsibilities to individual departments. This requires less reorganization, but it can result in data silos, redundant policies, and finger-pointing if you’re not careful. To avoid this problem, you should use a centralized document storage and compliance platform.

Centralized GRC Coordination

A centralized GRC team is similar to an organizational committee. All decision-making, reporting, and management tasks happen as a group instead of individually (though members have areas of specialization). At first, this is more time-consuming, but the long-term results are fantastic.

Hybrid GRC Team

With this structure, the central GRC officer or team meets regularly with departmental representatives. This option is often more agile and cost-effective to implement. It provides less oversight but helps prevent data silos.

Co-Managed GRC Solutions

Some organizations opt to outsource parts of GRC strategy and management, especially when budget restrictions or lack of expertise are a factor. This includes third-party CISOs or an outside team to support the in-house GRC officer.

What Are the Most Important GRC Responsibilities?

The size of your GRC team depends on how large and complex your operations are. This checklist for GRC roles ensures you have key responsibilities covered:

• GRC strategy creation
• Policy implementation
• Risk management
• Compliance with regulatory, organizational, industry, or client standards
• IT and network security
• Data loss prevention and risk mitigation
• Internal and external audits
• Quality assurance and reporting

All GRC processes follow the same organizational progression: Strategy > policy > training > implementation > management >  monitoring.

How Can You Simplify GRC Roles?

Compliance platforms like Compyl are a huge help for managing GRC roles. State-of-the-art tools help with compliance tracking, gap analysis, and workflow automation, reducing the risk of human errors. Discover how Compyl can streamline GRC responsibilities for your organization.