Padraic O’Reilly is the Founder at CyberSaint, transforming cyber risk management with AI, automation, and actionable insights.
For decades, governance, risk and compliance (GRC) platforms have been the backbone of enterprise risk management. But GRC was never built for cybersecurity—it was designed for static compliance processes, annual audits and regulatory checklists.
Cyber risk, however, is anything but static. It is a dynamic, real-time challenge, evolving daily with new threat intelligence, regulatory shifts and an increasingly complex business environment. According to Gartner’s Innovation Insight: Cyber GRC Streamlines Governance report, “When organizations use multiple tools focused on different risk domains, not specifically designed for cyber GRC, data is fragmented, and it is difficult to understand the impact of cyber risks.”
Cyber threats have intensified dramatically. For instance, Amazon reported encountering approximately 1 billion cyber threats daily in 2024, a significant increase from 100 million earlier in the year. This surge is attributed in part to cybercriminals leveraging advancements in AI to enhance their attack strategies. Meanwhile, global cybersecurity spending is projected to reach $212 billion in 2025, according to Gartner, a reminder of the resources required to keep up with emerging threats.
As AI reshapes the threat landscape and new SEC regulations put cyber risk in the boardroom, more organizations are beginning to shift from traditional GRC to automated, continuous cyber risk management. However, to ensure this transition is successful, businesses must take a strategic approach.
Why GRC Was Never Built For Cybersecurity
GRC was designed in an era where compliance was about proving adherence to frameworks like SOX, HIPAA or PCI through periodic assessments and manual checks. But cybersecurity doesn’t operate on an annual cycle. Threats emerge by the second, attack surfaces expand overnight and adversaries exploit vulnerabilities before most organizations even identify them. The rigid, checklist-based nature of GRC can create gaps in visibility, making it difficult if not impossible for organizations to adapt to real-time cyber threats.
This is especially important considering the growing need to provide a comprehensive view of an organization’s cyber risk posture and effectively mitigate risk against sophisticated, AI-driven cyberattacks at scale. For instance, hackers from nations like China and Iran are using advanced AI technologies to bolster their cyberattacks, employing AI to write malicious code, identify vulnerabilities and gather intelligence on target organizations.
The Financial Impact Of Incremental, Siloed Improvements
The financial repercussions of cybercrime are escalating. The global average cost of a data breach rose nearly 10% to $4.9 million in 2024, underscoring the significant financial risks organizations face from inadequate cyber risk management.
As advanced threat actors accelerate their tactics, security teams must adapt just as quickly. Yet, traditional cyber risk management—where GRC platforms primarily serve as documentation repositories rather than intelligence-driven systems—has left many CISOs reacting rather than proactively managing risk.
To navigate today’s evolving threat landscape, security leaders need more than FAIR quantification, compliance checklists or fragmented reporting. They require real-time, actionable insights that drive strategic decision-making, protect critical assets and facilitate meaningful communication with the board.
This demands a fundamental shift from reliance on disconnected point solutions toward integrated, platform-based approaches. By consolidating internal and external data across the entire cyber risk management lifecycle, organizations can move beyond static assessments to dynamic, intelligence-led strategies—enhancing risk visibility, improving response effectiveness and maximizing return on security investments.
The Regulatory Reckoning: Cyber Risk As A Board-Level Issue
The SEC’s cyber disclosure rules have made one thing abundantly clear: Cyber risk is now a boardroom concern. Boards are being held accountable for their organizations’ cyber postures, requiring security leaders to provide real-time, quantifiable insights into their risk landscapes.
For cybersecurity to be effective, it must be integrated into the core business strategy. The future is not about layering new tools on top of outdated processes—it’s about rethinking cyber risk management entirely. Adapting as quickly as our adversaries means leveraging the automation at our disposal, especially as AI innovation booms.
An automation-first approach should:
• Quantify cyber risk in financial terms, allowing security teams to communicate risk in a language the board understands.
• Provide real-time cyber risk intelligence by processing millions of data points including CVSS scores, threats, vulnerabilities, industry risks, benchmarks and control scores across frameworks.
• Continuously assess and adapt as the threat landscape changes, leveraging AI to ingest evolving threat and vulnerability data, industry benchmarks and breach reports, and deliver insights into exploitability based on your internal cyber risk posture.
• Break down silos between security, risk, compliance and executives, aligning all stakeholders with a single source of cyber truth.
• Deliver credible tracking and reporting for C-suite, board, auditor or regulatory review.
How To Shift To An Automation-First Strategy
How are organizations ensuring a smooth shift to an AI-first approach while avoiding disruption or confusion?
First, consider aligning internal stakeholders, including the SOC and GRC teams, making it clear that they should work as a team as insights into what gaps are the most critical surface. Use this as an opportunity to motivate them, as they’ll now be able to move from reactive, manual workloads to more strategic daily work.
Security leaders should also work with business leaders to align on how much risk is acceptable to their CEO or board. In addition, selecting a trusted vendor to guide your transformation can help as integrating automation in a way that complements your existing tech stack and team can make or break success.
By understanding these factors and proactively addressing common hurdles, organizations can take a strategic approach to modernizing their cyber risk management without disruption.
Showcasing Security ROI
Security leaders should communicate the value of this transformation to the CFO, CEO and board whenever necessary to get the proper backing. Moving to “automation-first” cyber risk management drives measurable financial impact by eliminating costly manual analysis, reducing reliance on outdated risk registers, and enabling AI-powered decision intelligence to prioritize cyber risks based on business context.
By continuously monitoring risk in real time, organizations can shift from reactive to adaptive risk management, optimizing resources and maximizing return on security investment (ROSI). You’ll be able to show in financial terms how much you’ve invested in security and what risk it’s addressed, as well as how you’ve driven business growth.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?