In 2025, risk is no longer just a compliance issue. It's a core element of business strategy, affecting everything from revenue to reputation. For CISOs and compliance professionals, effective risk management means moving beyond traditional checklists and embedding risk thinking across business units, functions, and decision-making processes. But this evolution isn't without obstacles. This blog explores the top seven challenges risk leaders face in 2025 and advanced strategies and tools to overcome them.
Many organizations still struggle with low risk maturity. Risks are often identified too late or misunderstood, and leadership may underestimate their business impact. Without clear ownership and visibility, emerging threats remain unchecked until it's too late.
Key challenges:
Fragmented risk identification practices
Limited leadership buy-in or understanding
Reactive rather than proactive approach
How to overcome it:
Build a risk-aware culture: Integrate risk into day-to-day operations, not just audits. Conducting regular risk reviews, security training, and cross-functional tabletop exercises are some of the ways organizations can ensure that employees at all levels understand their role in identifying and responding to risks.
Engage leadership early: Involve leadership not just in decision-making but in risk identification workshops, policy reviews, and risk mitigation planning. Use scenario analysis and real-world examples to show how risk affects business goals.
Strengthen early-stage risk workflows: Standardize how risks are captured across the business by embedding risk identification prompts into assessments, audits, and onboarding processes. Ensure consistency with predefined categories, ownership fields, and risk criteria.
Leverage AI for early identification: Go beyond static workflows by using AI to surface risks that may be missed through manual review. Advanced tools like 6clicks’ Hailey AI can flag and document emerging risks directly from assessments, minimizing blind spots and enabling prompt response.
Static, spreadsheet-based assessments are no match for today’s dynamic threat landscape. Manual processes often fail to capture interdependencies and evolving risks, leading to gaps and inaccurate prioritization.
Key challenges:
Assessments done annually or ad hoc
Subjective scoring with little consistency
Overlooked emerging or interconnected risks
How to overcome it:
Automate risk assessments: Use platforms like 6clicks to run dynamic, automated assessments that can be tailored to specific business units, regulatory frameworks, control sets, or asset types, ensuring contextual relevance and consistency at scale.
Incorporate real-time data: Feed assessments with threat intelligence and operational data to ensure they're always current and context-aware. 6clicks enables platform-wide linking, allowing users to connect assessment questions and responses directly to specific compliance requirements, controls, risks, issues, and assets, ensuring assessments reflect the full risk landscape.
Automate risk scoring: 6clicks supports automated risk scoring by calculating likelihood and impact based on predefined criteria and assessment responses, ensuring consistent and objective ratings without the need for manual input.
Risk is everyone’s responsibility, but most organizations treat it as a siloed function. Disconnected systems and teams make it difficult to share information or respond cohesively.
Key challenges:
Siloed data and duplicated efforts
Lack of visibility across business units
Slow, manual coordination during risk events
How to overcome it:
Centralize risk operations: Platforms like 6clicks unify risk, compliance, vendor oversight, incident management, and audits, in one system; eliminating silos and streamlining collaboration across teams.
Use shared taxonomies and workflows: Establish consistent terms, categories, and responsibilities to align cross-functional teams.
Enable real-time communication: Integrate your GRC workflows with collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams. Hailey Assist delivers risk updates directly into your daily workspace and accelerates response with real-time AI support.
The regulatory environment is growing more complex, especially for global enterprises. Juggling multiple frameworks and staying ahead of changes can overwhelm even experienced teams.
Key challenges:
Conflicting or overlapping requirements
Manual mapping of frameworks
High risk of non-compliance or duplicated effort
How to overcome it:
Leverage pre-built content libraries: 6clicks’ integrated Content Library provides access to 1000+ compliance frameworks, laws, and standards, including DORA, CMMC, ISO 27001, SOC 2, and more, helping organizations stay up-to-date with the latest regulatory content and industry best practices.
Automate compliance mapping: Stay ahead of regulatory change with AI doing the heavy lifting. Hailey AI can automatically map multiple frameworks, including different versions of the same standard or regulation, and identify overlaps within seconds. This makes it faster and easier to assess compliance while significantly reducing time, effort, and the risk of error.
Track regulatory updates in one place: Keep pace with change using a centralized compliance register that’s automatically updated. With 6clicks, you can view detailed changelogs for new framework versions and seamlessly download from the Content Library into your Compliance module, where all your mapped frameworks are centrally managed.
Many risk and compliance teams are being asked to do more with less: less budget, less time, fewer people. Manual-heavy workflows simply don’t scale.
Key challenges:
Burnout and inefficiency from repetitive tasks
Delayed assessments or reporting
Inability to scale operations across departments or locations
How to overcome it:
Automate the basics: Free up your team by automating traditionally time-consuming and manual tasks like control mapping, responding to assessments, reporting, and vendor reviews.
Use AI as a force multiplier: Save time and resources with a powerful AI engine like Hailey that can complete various tasks with next-level speed and accuracy, from mapping frameworks and identifying control gaps to generating assessment responses and risk treatment plans.
Standardize wherever possible: Use templates, workflows, and shared content to reduce duplication and streamline implementation. With 6clicks’ Hub & Spoke architecture and deployment model, you can centrally manage standardized content while allowing business units, departments, or subsidiaries to operate independently. This ensures consistency at scale with minimal overhead.
As organizations expand their reliance on vendors, partners, and cloud services, visibility into external risk exposure often lags behind. Without a clear view of third-party posture, a single vulnerability can trigger widespread operational, regulatory, or reputational consequences.
Key challenges:
Limited transparency into third-party security posture
Manual vendor onboarding and assessment
Disconnected or incomplete risk tracking
How to overcome it:
Implement an integrated TPRM solution: Use a centralized platform like 6clicks to automate vendor onboarding, assessments, and monitoring.
Automate high-volume reviews: 6clicks streamlines vendor due diligence with powerful bulk assessment capabilities. Create custom onboarding flows, import vendors at scale, and trigger automated assessments using turnkey templates, all without the manual overhead.
Continuously monitor key vendors: Don’t rely on point-in-time reviews. Continuous Control Monitoring provides real-time visibility into third-party performance, helping ensure that critical controls operate as intended and triggering alerts when shifts in risk posture occur.
Lastly, data inconsistency weakens trust in reports and slows decision-making. When information is scattered, outdated, or manually compiled, teams lose time and confidence.
Key challenges:
Inconsistent terminology and metrics
Manual reporting across siloed tools
Lack of real-time insights for executives
How to overcome it:
Standardize data capture and workflows: With 6clicks, you can define custom fields, workflows, and risk metrics to enforce consistent taxonomies and reporting across teams, business units, or entities. This ensures that risks, controls, and compliance activities are classified and measured in a standardized way, eliminating ambiguity and enabling more reliable insights.
Automate reporting: Generate board-ready reports with 6clicks’ one-click reporting feature, allowing teams and executives to easily align and make informed decisions faster.
Leverage real-time dashboards: Gain instant visibility into risk posture, control effectiveness, treatment progress, and other critical insights using 6clicks’ customizable dashboards.
Risk management in 2025 is more complex; but also more critical than ever. For security and compliance professionals, the good news is that advanced tools like AI and automation are making it easier to overcome traditional obstacles. The key lies in embracing technology, standardizing processes, and building an integrated, forward-looking risk management function.
Organizations that move beyond manual methods and adopt modern GRC platforms like 6clicks will be best positioned to respond quickly, act confidently, and lead with resilience.
Whether you're navigating complex frameworks, managing risk across multiple entities, or looking to eliminate inefficiencies, 6clicks provides the tools to modernize your risk and compliance program. From AI-powered automation to centralized management and scalable deployment, 6clicks helps you move faster and with confidence.