Introduction: The GRC Selection Challenge
Every year, organizations face more cybersecurity regulations to comply with, more risks to manage, and greater pressure to prove they’re prepared. Leadership teams want clear answers:
Are we OK? Are we legally defensible? Are we as ready for the attackers as we are for the regulators who follow them?
A common strategy is to buy a Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) platform. On paper, that sounds smart. In reality, most companies end up with a tool that looks impressive in demos but takes forever to set up, requires a small army to run, and still doesn’t deliver the peace of mind or clarity executives were promised.
It’s time to flip the script! For selecting a GRC, instead of buying software for the features it offers, the smarter move is to start managing cybersecurity the way you manage any other part of your business and focus on outcomes. That’s where Reasonable Risk’s Outcomes-as-a-Service (OaaS) model comes in.
The Pitfalls of Traditional GRC Selection or The Failure of Most GRCs
While GRCs are considered essential management tools, they’ve earned a mixed reputation. Consider these common complaints in selecting a GRC:
- Feature overload: You buy a platform with “hundreds of capabilities” but only use five.
- Internal drain: Your people work as hard to maintain the GRC as they do to reduce cyber risk.
- Long wait for value: Sometimes it takes 12–24 months before you see anything useful from them.
- Shaky ROI: Success gets measured in licenses purchased, not risks reduced.
- Meaningless metrics: GRCs report status and progress using meaningless scores.
- All ‘C’ and no ‘GR’: Without governance and risk guidance, executives can’t make informed decisions about priorities, reasonable costs, and risk acceptance.
- Evidence of liability. When your incident happens, your compliance-focused GRC becomes evidence of what you didn’t do.
- Continued silos: Legal, audit, compliance, and risk teams still don’t share the same view or speak the same language.
The result? A frustrated team, a sunk investment, and little improvement in actual resilience.
From Features to Outcomes: A Better Way to Evaluate GRC
The problem isn’t the idea of GRC software. The problem is how most GRCs are built.
Instead of asking, “What features should we add?”, GRC developers should ask:
- What outcomes will this platform deliver for our customers?
- How quickly will they see those outcomes?
- Is the mission to deliver better outcomes or add features?
The cybersecurity marketplace suffers from what Tony Sager of Center for Internet Security calls, “the fog of more.” More tools, more features, more reports, and more assessments make it difficult for us to know what to focus on and what noise to ignore.
But when you focus on outcomes, GRC stops being about features and starts being about real progress: clarity for technicians, confidence for executives, defensibility for counsel, and trust for regulators.
The Four Outcomes That Matter Most
When selecting a GRC platform, Reasonable Risk believes it should always focus on these four outcomes:
- Governance Alignment / Automated Governance
- Action: Map all your frameworks in one place.
- Outcome: Critical regulations mapped and monitored within days.
- Action: Quickly create clear expectations for your cybersecurity program.
- Outcome: Critical regulations are itemized and monitored within a few days or weeks and not months or years.
- Risk Visibility or Meaningful, Visible Risk
- Action: Give leadership a clear view of risk in plain English.
- Outcome: Executive-ready risk dashboard in 30 days.
- Action: Use risk language that is grounded in business performance and public interest.
- Outcome: Intelligible executive dashboard in 30 days.
- Audit Readiness & Defensibility or Affirmative Defense
- Action: Identifying and balancing risks, safeguards, and the interests of the organization, its clients, and the public. Document how they were addressed and keep your risk register current so you’re always ready for auditors.
- Outcome: Audit-ready risk register updated.
- Action: Identifying risks, managing reasonable safeguards, tracking progress and decisions.
- Outcome: An affirmative defense when incidents occur.
- Operational Efficiency
- Action: Automate reporting and cut busy work.
- Outcome: 50% reduction in risk reporting workload in the first year.
- Action: Focus on essential governance and risk processes. No more.
- Outcome: Technicians and executives focus on reducing risk, not managing GRCs and trying to make them make sense.
These outcomes are specific, measurable, and tied directly to business value — not “software checkboxes”.
Outcome-as-a-Service: The Reasonable Risk Difference
Reasonable Risk doesn’t just hand you a platform and wish you luck. We take actionable outcomes seriously. The team behind Reasonable Risk are the country’s leading experts on “reasonable” cybersecurity. After years of implementing cybersecurity governance and as expert witnesses in cyber breach cases, Reasonable Risk has been designed to provide only the most important functionality in making governance work. That’s the heart of Outcome-as-a-Service (OaaS).
Here’s what that means:
- Clear commitments. Example: Audit readiness in 90 days.
- Shared accountability. Who owns outcomes within your organization, not just entering data into the tool?
- Ongoing improvement. As regulations evolve, your risk management evolves too.
- Accessible to everyone. Built for executives, counsel, auditors, risk practitioners — not simply about controls.
Case Study: Financial Services Firm
The Situation:
- A financial services company was overwhelmed by a maze of overlapping regulations and burdened with a costly GRC tool that sat mostly unused. Compliance felt like a losing battle and leadership had little visibility into real risks.
The Action:
- After switching to Reasonable Risk’s Outcome-as-a-Service approach, the company quickly turned the tide and saw frameworks consolidated immediately as this is “out of the box “.
- Risk dashboard delivered in under 30 days.
- Achieved significant reduction in time and effort for risk reduction and remediation.
- Evidence kept up to date in near real time.
The Outcome:
- Continuous risk management, lower costs, and a leadership team that finally felt confident in the firm’s risk posture.
Why Reasonable Risk?
At the end of the day, selecting a GRC platform isn’t about the software. It’s about whether it delivers the results you need. That’s what sets Reasonable Risk apart.
We bring:
- Speed — outcomes in weeks, not years.
- Proven outcomes — legal defensibility, audit readiness, efficiency.
- Ease of use — designed for every role that touches GRC.
- Flexibility — start small, scale as your needs grow.
Conclusion
Most GRC platforms promise a lot but do not deliver. Reasonable Risk changes that by making the outcome itself the product.
Reasonable Risk – delivering results in risk management and governance.
How’s that for an outcome?
Contact us to schedule a Reasonable Risk Demo, or reach out to our integration partner, HALOCK Security Labs for more information on CIS RAM and/or DoCRA.