Why GRC Programs Fail Without Continuous Cyber Risk Intelligence

Why Cyber Risk Data Must Power the Future of GRC

GRC Needs Evidence, Not Assumptions

Supply chains now shape enterprises, which increasingly rely on an expanding ecosystem of vendors, partners, and suppliers. For Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) professionals, managing this sprawling third-party network creates a deeply complex challenge, as static assessments no longer keep pace with evolving cyber threats.

GRC teams are rightly tasked with ensuring that this expanding ecosystem operates within the organization’s risk tolerance. Governance, Risk, and Compliance platforms are the command centers for this effort, built to manage policies, controls, and structured workflows. However, most GRC systems still rely on static vendor inputs like attestations and surveys.

Teams feed these robust GRC systems vendor self-attestations and questionnaires. But this method leaves a fundamental risk gap. These assessments are subjective, provide only a point-in-time snapshot, and are increasingly insufficient for today’s dynamic threat landscape.

To achieve true integrated risk management, GRC professionals must incorporate objective, continuous cyber risk data into their workflows. GRC professionals use AuditBoard, Diligent, ServiceNow, LogicGate, Process Unity, and Archer with SecurityScorecard to incorporate continuous cyber risk intelligence into their workflows. This integration is what makes GRC programs defensible as supply chains grow and change.

When Diligent connects to SecurityScorecard, for instance, teams receive continuously updated cyber risk insights that align with internal risk metrics, making it easier to prioritize remediation and elevate cybersecurity into strategic, board-ready conversations.

ServiceNow users pair SecurityScorecard breach intelligence with automated assessments, enabling real-time monitoring and faster response across their vendor ecosystem.

With AuditBoard’s SecurityScorecard integration, users can link vendors, products, and third parties via Vendor Relationships and automatically aggregate SecurityScorecard scores in one view. This enables deeper insight into vendor health when anomalies arise.

Reasons Why Self-Assessments No Longer Work for GRC Teams

Point-in-time questionnaires and self-attestations can’t verify controls or detect new vulnerabilities. Here’s where traditional assessments fall short in GRC programs, and what to do instead.

The Three Failures of Static Assessments

1. Stale Data:

The risk assessment reflects a vendor’s posture only on the day they signed off on the questionnaire. This leaves your organization blind to new critical vulnerabilities or malware infections that occur between assessment cycles.

This delay is particularly dangerous during events like major zero-day exploits, or when there are zero days from discovering the flaw to fix it, such as Log4j or MOVEit. In these cases, time-to-detection should be measured in hours, not months.

A GRC process that relies on a manual reassessment schedule is fundamentally incapable of managing this speed of threat.

1. Subjective Attestation:

Promises in attestations often lack independent, objective validation of the control’s effectiveness in the real world. When a vendor shares that they patch critical vulnerabilities within 30 days, for instance, it may not be how they actually execute on their patching program.

If a vendor affirms they have certain email security policies, any given GRC platform records compliance, but it cannot verify if the vendor actually has exposed SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) servers or high-risk email vulnerabilities that threat actors are actively exploiting on the internet.

1. Incomplete Scope:

Questionnaires are limited to the systems the vendor chooses to disclose. They frequently miss forgotten subdomains, old test environments, or misconfigured cloud assets that may not be known to the internal team filling out the questionnaire.

Static Risk Data Creates Blind Spots

This means the GRC risk register is incomplete, as it fails to account for the full digital footprint of the third party.

A vendor that looks compliant on paper may have a significant, unassessed vulnerability exposed through an unmanaged asset. When GRC teams depend only on these kinds of questionnaires, they overlook active threats and misallocate time and resources.

By way of example, SecurityScorecard has long partnered with ServiceNow to help mutual customers better manage cyber risk. ServiceNow’s TPRM module incorporates SecurityScorecard breach incident data so teams can automatically receive breach details (such as breach type, source, and impact date) and trigger vendor-specific assessments.

What Continuous Security Ratings Add to GRC

Continuous visibility and objective intelligence can close the gap between compliance and security in GRC programs.

The Case for External Validation in GRC Tools

Organizations can improve GRC programs by adopting an outside-in approach and scanning the public-facing internet for evidence of security issues on vendors’ networks, such as DNS health, patching cadence, or exposed services.

The core outcome is continuous, external security evidence. SecurityScorecard provides this necessary data with:

• Evidence-Based Ratings:

SecurityScorecard’s A-F security rating and 10 detailed factor grades are based on technical evidence of security findings, making the assessment quantitative and objective. These grades translate directly into security factors, such as Patching Cadence (a measure of timely software updates), IP Reputation (tracking association with malware or botnets), and DNS Health (monitoring for domain security errors).

• Quantifying the Risk:

This data is statistically proven to highlight vulnerabilities. Companies with an F rating are 13.8x more likely to experience a data breach when compared to companies with an A rating.

This translates technical risk into a clear business metric, allowing the GRC system to quantify exposure not in vague terms, but with actionable, statistically-backed data.

This is essential for executive leadership and compliance reporting.

Diligent, for instance, integrates with SecurityScorecard to provide continuous risk insights. This can give board members a clear view of risk for third and fourth parties (or vendors’ vendors) aligned to in line with team priorities and benchmarks. This makes cyber risk part of strategic discussions, not just technical updates. 

With AuditBoard’s integration, SecurityScorecard ratings are automatically surfaced across mapped vendors and tools. This allows teams to gain insights into risk in a single, contextualized view, surfacing systemic risk clusters that could otherwise go unnoticed. When potential issues emerge, such as a sudden score drop, GRC managers can immediately trace the potential impact across their vendor ecosystem.

How to Operationalize Cyber Ratings in GRC Platforms

After integrating technical evidence into GRC platforms like AuditBoard or Diligent, your team can validate controls, trigger workflows, and maintain compliance logs so your team spends less time chasing vendors.

• Validation:

Adding this data into your GRC workflow serves as the ultimate evidence tool. GRC platforms can use SecurityScorecard data to validate or contradict vendors’ subjective questionnaire answers.

For example, a GRC platform can be configured to automatically flag a vendor as “High Risk” if their written assessment claims strong patching controls, but their Patching Cadence factor grade is a ‘D’ or ‘F’ on SecurityScorecard.

• The Automation Trigger: 

Beyond validation, integrating data like this can establish foundational rules for automation and off-cycle reassessments, which is the core of modern GRC programs.

GRC platforms can be configured to use rating as a non-negotiable threshold for reassessments. If a SecurityScorecard rating drops below C, TPRM teams can automatically create an incident ticket, escalate the risk to the CIO or CISO, and flag the vendor for a reassessment.

This automation ensures the GRC program is event-driven, not schedule-driven.

• Audit-Ready Defensibility:

The result is transforming static assessments into defensible, validated risk profiles backed with quantifiable, independent data.

Continuous logging of SecurityScorecard ratings provides evidence of ongoing due diligence that auditors seek when reviewing compliance against frameworks like ISO 27001 or SOC 2.

The ServiceNow-SecurityScorecard integration, for instance, allows teams to track and report on historical breach trends across their supply chain and portfolios, making it easier to surface systemic risks and demonstrate supply chain oversight to auditors and regulators.

How to Build a Defensible GRC Program with SecurityScorecard

When you pair GRC structure with outside-in cyber intelligence, you move from passive tracking to proactive risk mitigation. This is how smart companies do it, with the objective, continuous intelligence of SecurityScorecard. The GRC tool manages the policy and workflow, and SecurityScorecard provides the real-time, objective validation.

By integrating GRC tools like ServiceNow or LogicGate with SecurityScorecard, GRC managers can shift their programs from reactive compliance to proactive, continuous risk management. This integrated approach ensures that resources are allocated efficiently, critical risks are identified immediately, and the program is fully defensible to auditors and the board.