Transforming GRC: Building an efficient, resilient, and scalable program

The GRC landscape today is defined by rising regulatory pressure, evolving threats, and growing stakeholder scrutiny. Organizations are expected to move faster, prove compliance more often, and respond to risk in real time—all while maintaining operational efficiency. To stay ahead, organizations need a modern approach. From streamlining operations to enabling smarter decision-making, learn key strategies for transforming your GRC program and discover how the right technology foundation can drive effective results, long-term resilience, and sustainable growth. Read on for more.

The high cost of inefficiency

For many enterprises, advisors, and managed service providers (MSPs), GRC programs remain fragmented. Risk registers live in spreadsheets. Assessments are manual and repetitive. Controls are duplicated across frameworks. Reporting requires time-consuming consolidation from disconnected systems. And when you're managing multiple entities or clients, the lack of standardization makes everything even harder to scale and govern effectively.

These inefficiencies reduce visibility, delay response, and hinder confident decision-making, resulting in a fragmented, reactive GRC program that often looks like this:

• Increased risk exposure: Manual workflows slow down the identification and mitigation of emerging risks

• Missed compliance deadlines: Disconnected systems, scattered evidence, and manual tracking lead to last-minute scrambles and increase the risk of non-compliance

• Inconsistent reporting to leadership: Without real-time insights or standardized reporting, leadership decisions are delayed or misinformed

• Difficulty scaling operations: Repetitive work and inconsistent processes make it hard to support multiple entities, business units, or clients efficiently

• Overburdened teams: Skilled staff spend too much time on low-value tasks like data entry, reconciliation, and document hunting

In order to operate at scale and stay resilient in the face of change, organizations need to move on from traditional processes and embrace a more integrated, proactive approach to GRC.

Building the right foundation for a high-performing GRC program

Transforming your approach requires robust strategies that go beyond patchwork solutions. This starts with the right foundation, where technology plays a central role in unifying siloed functions, automating manual processes, and delivering real-time visibility across your risk and compliance landscape.

Here’s how leading organizations are leveraging smarter technology solutions to develop an agile, future-ready GRC program:

Unify risk, compliance, and audit in one platform

Bringing risk, compliance, and audit activities into a single, integrated system not only takes away the burden of juggling multiple tools. It creates a connected environment where teams can collaborate in real time, draw from the same source of truth, and execute processes more efficiently across the board.

Platforms such as 6clicks enable teams to manage core GRC functions, including risks, controls, vendors, issues, incidents, audits, and assessments—all in one place. With 6clicks, organizations can benefit from:

• Complete, built-in functionality from risk and incident registers to task assignment features

• Centralized evidence and automatic documentation for audit readiness from day one

• Standardized workflows and advanced customization to ensure consistency and uniformity

• Data linking across modules for end-to-end visibility and management

By unifying your GRC program on a centralized platform, you can streamline complex processes and enable better execution and oversight.

Centralize governance while enabling localized autonomy

For federated organizations, advisors, and MSPs, balancing centralized oversight with the need for localized flexibility is often where traditional systems break down.

6clicks solves this with its unique Hub & Spoke architecture, designed to support both governance and autonomy at scale. With this model, you can:

• Define frameworks, templates, and policies from a command center called the “Hub”

• Distribute content and best practices across entities or clients through logically separated yet centrally connected environments known as “Spokes”

• Empower individual teams or clients to manage their own risk and compliance activities within their dedicated Spoke environments

• Consolidate reports across all Spokes at the Hub

The result: consistent governance, tailored execution, and scalable service delivery—all without the complexity of managing separate systems or duplicating effort.

Standardize and accelerate with ready-made content

Onboarding a new entity, business unit, or client shouldn’t mean starting from scratch every time. The right content foundation enables consistency across your operations while still giving you room to customize.

Unlike other platforms, 6clicks comes with a built-in Content Library, preloaded with hundreds of frameworks, risk libraries, policy templates, and assessment packs. That means you can:

• Launch new engagements or initiatives faster – Quickly spin up risk and compliance programs across new clients, entities, or business units using turnkey content.

• Enable standardized, repeatable processes – Implement standardized templates and methodologies to reduce variation and improve oversight.

• Accelerate onboarding and reduce duplication – Equip entities, business units, or clients with pre-configured frameworks, assessments, and policies to cut setup time and avoid reinventing the wheel.

• Scale programs across regions or entities with ease – Adapt and deploy content to meet global and regional requirements while maintaining centralized governance.

Whether you're aligning with ISO 27001, NIST CSF, SOC 2, or regional regulations, having content at your fingertips fuels both speed and consistency.

Automate compliance mapping and alignment with AI

Manually mapping controls and frameworks is time-consuming, error-prone, and often a barrier to scaling GRC efforts. Whether assessing control implementation against ISO 27001 or identifying overlaps across standards like NIST CSF and regional requirements such as DORA, enterprises and GRC service providers alike spend countless hours recreating relationships between frameworks, controls, and obligations.

Automation eliminates this problem by enabling organizations to quickly match requirements and determine their compliance without spending hours manually analyzing frameworks. 6clicks takes this a step further with AI, introducing next-level speed and accuracy into the process. With Hailey AI, organizations can:

• Match frameworks at the provision level and instantly identify both overlapping and unique requirements

• Map implemented controls to specific framework requirements and quickly identify compliance status

• Easily evaluate alignment with other standards or regulations based on existing compliance mappings

AI-powered automation enables organizations to surface and address gaps faster, eliminate duplication, and achieve compliance more efficiently.

Extract actionable insights directly from assessments

Assessments are one of the most valuable tools in a GRC program, but most teams still rely on static checklists and manual interpretation.

AI changes that by turning raw assessment data into actionable findings. With 6clicks, assessments don’t just capture responses; they trigger automated analysis, surface key risks and issues, and feed results directly into your core registers for action. Hailey AI can automate risk and issue identification from assessment responses, instantly creating corresponding records and automatically linking them to relevant data such as your controls, assets, or vendors. This ensures:

• No manual review is needed

• No critical risks or issues are overlooked

• Identified risks and issues are accurate, traceable, and align with the organization’s specific context

• Remediation efforts are initiated promptly

This enhances your responsiveness and further embeds resilience into your program without adding overhead.

Automatically translate findings into structured action plans

Risk identification is only half the battle. The next challenge is translating risks or issues into concrete next steps, which often involves manually defining actions, listing responsibilities, and aligning them with organizational processes and objectives.

With AI, you can finally automate this process and easily create detailed action plans based on your data. 6clicks specifically enables this through Hailey AI, which can automatically generate treatment plans and remediation tasks out of risks, issues, and incidents. Not only can Hailey AI generate a complete set of tasks within seconds, but it can also automatically sequence them by priority, link them to associated records, and ensure each task aligns with your policies and compliance requirements.

You can then assign owners, set deadlines, and monitor remediation progress—all within the platform. With AI, you can minimize delays caused by manual inefficiencies, enable effective prioritization, and accelerate response while ensuring actions stay aligned with broader governance and compliance goals.

Drive faster, informed decisions with board-ready reports

Effective reporting is at the heart of strong GRC. Without it, risks remain hidden, priorities are unclear, and leadership is forced to make decisions with incomplete or outdated information.

But when reports are automated and embedded directly into your workflows, you eliminate the need for data chasing and spreadsheet consolidation, and stakeholders—from operational teams to the board—always have access to accurate, real-time insights. With 6clicks, you can generate reports in one click, use advanced data visualization tools, and leverage comprehensive dashboards to instantly retrieve key metrics such as:

• Control performance and overall compliance posture

• Assessment completion rate

• Ongoing risk treatments

• Pending high-priority incidents

• And more

Better reporting enables timely, data-driven decisions that lead to stronger outcomes in your GRC program.

Moving forward: What a future-ready GRC program looks like

Modern GRC programs need to be more than compliant. They need to be:

✅ Efficient, with automation and centralization that eliminate manual work and streamline complex processes
✅ Resilient, with AI-powered insights and real-time response that strengthen your ability to manage risk proactively
✅ Scalable, with architecture and content models that support consistent implementation across entities, business units, or clients
✅ Agile, with built-in flexibility to align with evolving threats, regulatory requirements, and organizational priorities
✅ Effective, with clear oversight, structured execution, and decisions driven by accurate, real-time data

With the right technology foundation, you don’t just modernize your GRC program—you turn it into a competitive advantage.

Get started with 6clicks

Leverage an all-in-one platform with efficiency, resilience, and scalability built in.

• Experience next-generation AI capabilities for streamlining tasks, enhancing precision, and empowering a proactive GRC strategy

• Ensure end-to-end risk management using one powerful risk register with custom fields and workflows, supporting everything from risk evaluation to treatment

• Simplify multi-framework compliance with automated mapping and gap analysis, centralized policy and control management, and continuous control monitoring

• Take advantage of a full-stack GRC suite, including functionality for vendor oversight, issue and incident management, and audits and assessments

• Enable centralized governance and localized autonomy with Hub & Spoke—ideal for enterprises and service providers managing multiple entities or clients