Beyond Compliance

Your compliance program is about to be automated out of existence.

Let that sink in for a minute.

While you're busy color-coding spreadsheets and perfecting your NIST mapping, AI is already writing better security policies than most GRC teams. It's automating framework mappings that took you weeks in seconds. And soon, it will be generating smarter risk assessments than your entire department.

If your GRC function is just a documentation factory or checkbox exercise, you're already obsolete. You just don't know it yet.

Think about these GRC professionals who build elaborate control frameworks and meticulous documentation while completely failing to move the security needle or gain allies. They're the first to complain that "nobody takes security seriously" while simultaneously making security the most painful, bureaucratic experience possible. They're a dying breed.

The compliance industrial complex is crumbling, and the only GRC professionals who will survive are those who recognize that security is about people, relationships, and delivering actual value. Not processes and paperwork.

The Death of Security Theatre

Let's be brutally honest: most of what passes for security and compliance today is just theater. Defined as: an elaborate performance designed to look good rather than actually protect anything.

As GRC professionals, we've become drunk on our own power. We make sure the company plays by the rules... our rules. We block projects. Stall deployments. Reject vendors. And we've convinced ourselves this is "doing security."

But here's the problem: when compliance teams go on auto-pilot, they stop enabling and start dictating. "To scale," "to standardize"... but let's call it what it really is: "to make our lives easier and justify our existence."

HR drowns in FBI-level background checks that make hiring impossible.

The Platform team suffocates under backup policies written by people who've never restored a system.

Engineers waste sprints implementing controls that protect against threats that don't exist.

Yes, we have the power to force this. That doesn't make it right. It makes us part of the problem. The most insidious part is that it's almost impossible to prove that a control has ZERO value. There's no ROI, but we're so afraid of "degrading our overall security posture" that we keep the charade going...

When we impose rules, people comply. But they don't own the outcome. As soon as you stop enforcing the rules, they will stop following them because you've provided them only with an extrinsic reason to act.

That's the difference between compliance and commitment, between following and owning.

The Signs Your GRC Program Is Failing

Look around your organization. If you see these symptoms, your program isn't just ineffective, it's actively harmful:

• Committees of people who don't do the work hold all the power, dragging decisions through endless cycles
• Every minor risk gets escalated to leadership where it dies a slow death in perpetual limbo
• You produce beautiful documentation that no one reads, references, or uses
• Engineers receive controls to implement like homework assignments with zero context

This isn't security. It's bureaucracy wearing a security badge.

GRC should solve problems, not manufacture them. But too often, we've become so infatuated with our processes that we've forgotten their purpose.

Escape Your Compliance Prison Before It's Too Late

You were hired because the company needed someone to "deal with that compliance problem." But is that really all you're capable of? Is that why you got into security?

I doubt it. And in the age of AI, being just "the compliance person" is a career death sentence.

Here are 3 radical moves to transform yourself from cost center to strategic asset:

Infiltrate the sales teams

Stop hiding in your compliance corner. Get aggressive about understanding your company's sales process. Learn their partnerships and B2B sales motions like your career depends on it. Because it kind of does. Build them that security FAQ they desperately need. Even better? Build a GPT to answer those questions automatically. Watch how quickly you transform from bureaucratic blocker to revenue enabler.

Forge an alliance with legal

Here's one of my biggest career revelations: GRC and legal speak the same language of risk and ambiguity. This is your ticket to business relevance. This partnership will transform you from "compliance person" to "strategic advisor" practically overnight.

Make finance and procurement your weapon

In our cloud-first world, every solution is quoted by user/month, and most companies are hemorrhaging money on unused licenses. Connect those dots between your purchasing teams and the IT folks managing IAM. Find those cost savings. Watch how quickly your Third-Party risk program becomes everyone's priority when you're saving them millions instead of just asking for documentation.

Your Secret Weapon: Connecting the Dots

While the rest of the organization is siloed, GRC professionals have a superpower that nobody else has: institutional knowledge that spans the entire enterprise.

We see every layer of an organization. We collaborate with everybody because security needs to be embedded everywhere. We interact with procurement to strengthen supplier relationships. We're twins with privacy. We influence HR processes. We meet with IT daily. We audit engineering systems.

If you work in B2B companies, you also touch sales and marketing. For the curious mind, this is the opportunity to absorb domains of knowledge, new approaches, and emerging projects all while being positioned to create connections no one else can see.

This knowledge is a cheat code for organizational influence.

Simplify, Don't Complicate

Want to know why nobody cares about your fancy data classifications? Because they shouldn't have to.

I learned this the hard way after rolling out an intricate matrix of color-coded data classification levels and subcategories of confidential PII to our procurement team so they could do some screening for us. I thought it was brilliant.

Procurement's reaction? They looked at me like I was describing my weekend D&D campaign.

Our fancy data classification matrix was nerd's gibberish. We were so deep in our expert bubble that we'd forgotten the cardinal rule: our job is to make complex ideas simple, not simple ideas complex.

Real GRC work isn't about creating spreadsheets to make academics proud. It's about translating risk into language that drives action. We don't need to prove how smart we are. We need to prove how valuable we can be.

Instead of dragging everyone through our complexity, we need to start with their reality. Our job is to abstract complexity, not create more of it.

Frameworks Are Not Security

Here's another inconvenient truth: memorizing every control in PCI, ISO, NIST, and SOC2 doesn't make you good at security. It makes you good at taking tests.

Think about music. You can learn to read sheet music perfectly, know every note, every chord progression. But if you never pick up an instrument, never play, never improvise, are you really a musician? Security is the same. Frameworks are the sheet music, but the real job is playing the music.

The real game in GRC is understanding the entire enterprise ecosystem: cloud, IAM, networking, DevOps, data, software architecture... and then cross-referencing these technical layers with business processes, market plans, and partnerships.

Sure, you can be "the PCI person." You can make a living off it. But if you lock in too early, you're pigeonholing yourself. You risk becoming a one-trick pony. Or worse, you get so tied to the framework that you stop thinking critically and just parrot whatever's in the document.

Frameworks are tools. They're not the job. The job is making security happen. And to do that, you need to go beyond the checklist and learn how it all fits together.

Lead with Solutions, Not Process

Want to actually fix security instead of just talking about it? Dare to walk the hard path. Lead with objectives, not checkboxes.

Instead of slamming down a compliance mandate, ask the real questions:

• What resilience scenario are we actually trying to address?
• What's the real security risk we're trying to solve with this hiring practice?
• How would this control actually prevent the attacks we're seeing?

Then work backwards from the problem, NOT from a so-called "hard" requirement.

Here's a secret the certification bodies don't want you to know: Almost all frameworks have intentionally vague requirements because the people writing them know compliance is never one-size-fits-all. They're giving you room to adapt: use it!

GRC is at its best when it builds a culture where security is about attracting people to work together on objectives, not enforcing a fossilized list of controls dreamed up by textbook authors and long-gone consultants.

The Path Forward

If you want to survive the AI revolution in GRC, here's your new playbook:

• Only escalate risks when a fix requires multi-team resources. Sometimes all it takes is a few sprint points to make meaningful progress.
• Stop forcing processes full of security jargon. Adapt to the team's existing workflows and tools instead of making everyone conform to your processes.
• Treat frameworks as starting points, not gospels. Your job is to tailor them, absorb the complexity, and make them actionable. Otherwise, you're just an expensive parrot.
• Eliminate approval cycles and committees that don't add value. They don't just delay decisions—they actively disempower teams and kill innovation.

The compliance professionals who will thrive in the next decade aren't the ones with the most certifications or the strictest controls. They're the ones who build relationships, solve real problems, and connect dots that others can't even see.

The best GRC teams don't just follow documents—they lead with relevance and action.

Which one are you going to be?