Swimlane has officially published the results from a new survey, which revealed that only 29% of all organizations say their compliance programs consistently meet internal and external standards.
Named ad “GRC Chaos: The High Price of Audits and Non-Compliance,” the report informs readers on how fragmented workflows, manual evidence gathering, and poor collaboration between GRC teams are leaving organizations vulnerable to audit failures, regulatory penalties, and security gaps.
More on the given exercise would reveal how Swimlane surveyed a total of 500 IT and security decision-makers across the United States and the United Kingdom who had at least 1,000 employees. All of them came together to eventually indicate a clear need for streamlined workflows, stronger cross-team alignment, and intelligent automation if there is to be restoration of confidence for management and the board in compliance readiness.
“Audit readiness is harder than it should be,” said Jack Rumsey, Head of GRC at Swimlane. “Teams are wasting time chasing evidence, interpreting requirements in isolation and stitching together data across disconnected systems. This report highlights just how unsustainable that model has become — and why it’s time to rethink how to manage compliance from the ground up.”
Talk about the results, they begin by revealing that compliance burden across the burden is getting heavier with time. You see, the survey discovered that more than 96% of organizations say it’s challenging to keep up with the growing number of industry regulations, whereas on the other hand, no more than 29% reported that their compliance programs consistently meet internal and external standards.
Next up, the survey uncovered fragmented and fractured processes at large, as over 92% of respondents rely on three or more tools to gather audit evidence. This would often result in duplicated effort and disjointed workflows. In fact, on an average, just 39% of the audit evidence process was found to be automated.
Almost like an extension of that, over half of organizations (54%) said they spend more than five hours each week on manual compliance tasks. In case that wasn’t enough, 62% said their audit evidence-gathering process is at least occasionally error-prone.
Beyond this, 90% of organizations also claimed that they are concerned about poor collaboration between GRC and security teams, something which has shown to undermine their audit preparation. In essence, clashing priorities, unclear roles, and communication breakdowns have emerged as major barriers to alignment.
Rounding up highlights would be a piece of data which relates to how a large chunk of organizations cited financial penalties (39%), security breaches (36%), and reputational damage (36%) as the top risks of poor compliance management.
“The burden of compliance weighs heavy on security and GRC teams, and the pain is growing faster than teams can adapt,” said Michael Lyborg, CISO at Swimlane. “Regulations are shifting, expectations are rising, and yet most organizations still rely on processes that were never designed for this level of complexity. Until now, everything has been massive spreadsheets. Without better coordination and smarter workflows, even well-intentioned programs will fall short.”