Why GRC Departments are moving to SaaS

Are you confident in your company’s ability to meet all of its GRC requirements? Is your organization truly as transparent, and are your compliance processes as thorough as they should be?

If you answered NO to any of these questions, don’t worry, it only means your organization is human (ok, well technically comprised of humans). It also means you are far from alone.

Chris Noell on Financial Tech Spotlight writes “As we move further into 2011, the number of applicable regulations and standards will continue to increase, making the importance of Government Risk and Compliance (GRC) rise for organizations that are looking to protect against security breaches.” Meaning, if you were not confident in your organizations GRC program in 2010, you will be less so in 2011. Naturally, as the burden of governmental risk and compliance increases, the strain on internal processes goes up as well.

So what does this mean for software as a service? “As regulatory requirements increase, usage of the cloud and SaaS technologies will grow and the number of obligations imposed by business partners will increase.” A scalable, flexible, relatively inexpensive SaaS model to help your GRC team achieve full regulatory compliance can significantly cut out expensive (and imperfect) internal processes. Why have employees micromanage your compliance and risk processes, when the internet can do it better?

As far as Mr. Noell’s prediction for 2011: “This year expect to see more new implementations leveraging a SaaS delivery model for GRC. In today’s economy, organizations want to take advantage of lower operating costs, faster time to deploy, less risk, and the high flexibility of a SaaS model.”