Top GRC & Audit Challenges Businesses Face in 2025

Enterprise GRC & Audit Challenges: The Biggest hidden risks and huddles businesses face in 2025 (…and tips on how to solve them)

Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) is essential for businesses, yet many face difficulties with changing regulations, complex audits, and fragmented risk management. In this fast-paced digital world, companies in regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and tech face unique challenges.

So, what are the biggest, most niche GRC and audit challenges enterprises face today? And how can modern solutions like @Drata help overcome them? Let’s dive in.

Adapting and keeping up with evolving Compliance requirements

The Challenge: Regulations such as GDPR, SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA continuously change, making compliance challenging. Manual tracking of updates may not be effective, and missing a requirement can result in penalties or unsuccessful audits.

The Solution: Automated GRC platforms such as Drata monitor regulatory changes and map them to your controls. This helps ensure compliance alignment in real-time without requiring manual effort.

Isolated Risk Management & Limited Visibility

The Challenge: Several enterprises manage GRC activities using separate spreadsheets, emails, and older tools. This results in:

Lack of real-time risk insights
Duplicate efforts across teams
Difficulty proving compliance during audits
Hundreds of hours lost in manual effort

The Solution: Unlike traditional compliance tools, Drata provides a centralised, real-time GRC platform, giving security and compliance teams a single source of truth. Its automated evidence collection and risk scoring methodology helps streamline decision making. It also offers end-to-end automation, seamless integrations, and proactive risk mitigation. Saving you time and resources while enhancing accuracy.

Audit exhaustion and manual evidence compilation

The Challenge: Audits require a significant amount of time, particularly when teams collect evidence manually, such as policies, logs, and access controls. This results in:

Human errors
Last-minute scrambles before audits
Increased costs from prolonged audits

The Solution: Drata automates the collection of evidence and maintains a posture ready for audits at all times. Its integrations with tools such as Okta, AWS, and GitHub pull real-time compliance data, reducing preparation time by 80% or more.

Third-Party & Supply Chain Risks

The Challenge: Enterprises depend on vendors, yet supply chain breaches, such as the SolarWinds product breach in September 2019, demonstrate that third-party risk poses a significant threat. Traditional vendor assessments tend to be slow and reactive.

The Solution: Drata’s vendor risk management automates identifying, evaluating, and monitoring third-party risks. Key features include security review of a vendor, vendor import via SSO/bulk upload, impact analysis, questionnaire responses, risk rating and tracking of vendors . The centralised dashboard for insights, streamlines compliance and reduces manual errors. These automated assessments and third-party compliance monitoring reduces exposure to supply chain vulnerabilities.

Scaling Compliance across multiple frameworks

The Challenge: Expanding businesses frequently require adherence to multiple regulatory frameworks concurrently, such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, and NIST. Manually managing overlapping controls in this context is highly inefficient.

The Solution: Drata’s compliance engine maps controls across various frameworks by allowing you to pursue or maintain multiple security frameworks without duplicating efforts, reducing redundancy. One control can meet multiple requirements, which saves time and effort.

Drata.com

Recommended practices for implementing Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) Automation.

Establish clear objectives and goals for automation.
Conduct a thorough assessment of current processes.
Choose an appropriate GRC platform that fits your needs.
Ensure stakeholder engagement and buy-in from all departments. ● Develop a comprehensive implementation plan with timelines.
Train employees on new systems and processes.
Regularly review and update automated processes to align with regulatory changes.
Monitor success metrics and adjust strategies as needed.

Whether you’re just starting your GRC automation journey or seeking to mature your implementation, you can get the most value from your chosen solution by considering the above recommended practices.

Automate Mission Critical Systems:

To achieve a comprehensive approach to IT compliance, it is essential to have an understanding of how your security controls operate across all mission-critical systems. For instance, your GRC automation should be integrated with your existing tools, including:

Human resources information systems (HRIS)
Single sign-on (SSO)
Cloud providers, like Google, AWS, and Azure
Task management tool
Ticketing systems

How Drata Transforms GRC & Audit Readiness

Drata isn’t just another GRC tool, it’s a Trust Management Platform platform built for large and scaling businesses that:

Automates evidence collection (no more spreadsheets!)

Provides real-time compliance monitoring

Reduces audit prep from weeks to days (Save hundreds of working hours) Integrates with 50+ cloud services (Slack, Jira, Azure, etc.)

Offers customisable reporting for auditors

For enterprises overwhelmed by manual GRC processes, @Drata offers a transformative solution, converting compliance from a challenge into a strategic advantage.

Statistics from *2022 Drata Customer Survey & Drataverse Product Keynote:

2100+ Hours saved by expediting security reviews*

100k+ Hours saved from spreadsheet work*

1M+ Controls connected and collecting evidence

CONCLUSION:

GRC and audit challenges remain, but with an effective approach and appropriate tools, businesses can manage risks, control costs, and successfully pass audits.

Want to see how Drata can simplify your compliance? Book a DEMO session with us! Thanks for reading

The Kootek Team

Keep safe and Stay Secure