Foreword
Matt Muller, Field CISO, Tines
With regulatory demands rising and security teams stretched thin, it’s no surprise that many organizations are rethinking how they approach governance, risk, and compliance (GRC). Even well-resourced teams struggle to balance regulatory obligations with broader goals around improving security posture.
GRC isn’t optional – it’s foundational. It plays a critical role in identifying and managing enterprise risk and meeting regulatory demands. But the traditional approach is no longer fit for purpose. Too many teams are stuck with siloed systems and manual processes that can’t scale to meet the complexity of modern enterprises.
And it’s only getting harder. Regulations are multiplying as governments race to catch up with cloud, AI, and emerging cyber threats. At the same time, threats are evolving. The attack surface is broader. Third-party dependencies are growing. And security teams are being asked to do more with less.
No wonder nearly half (46%) of security leaders say spiraling regulatory complexity keeps them up at night. Our research reveals nearly two-thirds (63%) of security practitioners and leaders are experiencing some level of burnout. The status quo simply isn’t sustainable.
But there’s a better way. A third of security leaders view compliance and reporting as a top-three challenge that could be solved with the right automation. By replacing fragmented, manual processes with unified, end-to-end workflows, teams can stay ahead of evolving standards and regulatory requirements – while reducing burnout and risk.
Done right, GRC is more than a requirement – it’s a strategic advantage. According to Drata, 98% of organizations already view it as a business driver. With the right workflow orchestration and automation, GRC becomes a foundation for resilience, agility, and smarter security. This guide will help you move beyond checkbox compliance – and turn GRC into a source of strength.
Chapter 1
The problem
Why GRC is harder than ever
GRC today is more complex, more visible, and more critical to get right – yet harder than ever to manage. As regulatory demands grow and cyber threats intensify, security and compliance teams are facing pressure on multiple fronts:
A shifting regulatory landscape
Nearly a third (30%) of organizations rank compliance as a top-three challenge, according to our Voice of the SOC research. Meanwhile, separate research from Drata showed nearly half (48%) of GRC teams struggle to keep pace with updates to existing frameworks – and identify areas requiring attention.
New legal jeopardy
Emerging regulations like Europe’s NIS2 and DORA introduce personal liability for security leaders in the event of serious incidents. In the U.S., the SEC has also shown a growing willingness to bring charges against CISOs for GRC failures.
Data management and privacy concerns
Teams must ensure data accuracy, integrity, and security while complying with data protection and privacy laws like GDPR. That requires strong data classification, encryption, and access controls – often across siloed systems.
Mounting cyber threats and vulnerabilities
As digital transformation increases the size of the typical corporate attack surface, threat actors are ready to exploit this. According to one estimate, the total number of vulnerabilities discovered in 2024 rose 61% annually. Regular risk assessments and continuous monitoring are required to mitigate such risks.
Time and resource constraints
Limited staff and resources hamper your ability to keep GRC efforts effective and current. Over half (51%) of GRC leaders admit they are exhausted identifying and integrating new frameworks into GRC programs.
Siloed ownership
GRC requires cross-functional collaboration and alignment – but many teams still operate in silos. Legal, security, IT, and finance may have different priorities, or view compliance as a box-checking exercise rather than a strategic function. Shared visibility and ownership are essential.
Competing priorities
GRC doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Security teams still need to deliver on broader goals – improving detection and response, managing vulnerabilities, or reducing tech debt. Without workflow orchestration and automation, GRC pulls resources from those critical initiatives.
“Part of what we suffer from is data silos – too many different systems that don’t talk to each other. It’s more of a checklist- based approach to security. Instead ask yourself: ‘What threats am I trying to protect against? How do I put together a couple of well-architected platforms so that I can solve this problem end-to- end with the least amount of overhead, maintenance, and opportunity for error?’”
Chapter 2
The opportunity
Workflow automation and orchestration
Manual processes and disconnected tools make GRC feel like a burden. But with the right workflows, security teams can automate manual tasks, orchestrate across systems, and turn GRC into a business enabler.
Here are four areas where GRC teams have leveraged orchestration and automation to make an immediate impact – with example workflows for each:
Streamline compliance processes
Routine tasks like evidence collection, policy management, and audit prep are repetitive and time-consuming. Automation handles the manual steps – data collection, analysis, reporting – so your team can move faster, reduce errors, and focus on strategic priorities.
→ Example: Automatically collect vulnerability or asset scan data from your security systems and upload it to your compliance dashboard – keeping data accurate and up to date without manual work.
Enhance risk management
Staying ahead of risk is difficult when signals are fragmented across tools, spreadsheets, and systems. Automation helps by aggregating data from internal sources, external databases, and threat intelligence feeds. With consistent, real- time scoring and analysis, teams can prioritize more effectively and mitigate risks sooner.
→ Example: Trigger a risk assessment when onboarding a new vendor, automatically calculate severity based on impact and likelihood, and log the results in a dynamic risk register.
Improve policy enforcement and monitoring
Enforcing policies and tracking employee compliance manually doesn’t scale. Automation ensures policies are delivered on schedule, acknowledgments are tracked, and violations are flagged early. Alerts and notifications enable teams to respond quickly to compliance gaps before they escalate.
→ Example: Automatically monitor compliance across your environment, flag policy violations, and send reminders to ensure timely resolutions.
Accelerate audit processes
Audit season doesn’t have to mean stress and scramble. Automated audit trails and reports give auditors comprehensive insight into controls, processes, and compliance status, helping teams complete audit cycles more efficiently and meet regulatory requirements.
→ Example: Ingest audit logs on a schedule, store them securely for long-term retention, and ensure activity trails are always accessible for audits or internal reviews.
“I’ve never been able to get anyone excited about compliance… How we got people excited was by saying, ‘Just don’t do it anymore. Let automation do that for you. Lock down your systems. Focus on operational excellence in cyber. Let us give you all the risk and compliance checkboxes for free.’”
Chapter 3
The impact
From bureaucracy to business enabler
GRC used to be viewed as a cost of doing business – a checkbox to satisfy regulators and avoid fines. But that’s changing. Today’s executives increasingly see it as a strategic function that strengthens decision-making, increases accountability, and drives agility across the business.
By orchestrating and automating GRC workflows, your organization can:
- Improve efficiency by reducing duplication, automating manual tasks, and standardizing key processes.
- Accelerate compliance with fewer errors through continuous monitoring, automated reporting, and proactive gap remediation.
- Reduce audit fatigue by mapping internal controls to multiple regulatory frameworks.
- Gain real-time visibility into controls through dashboards, reporting, real-time alerts, and more.
- Strengthen cross-team collaboration and accountability by breaking down silos and creating shared ownership of risk and compliance.
- Protect brand reputation by building trust and preventing major breaches. Half (51%) of organizations report brand damage due to compliance failures.
- Exceed compliance by strengthening security beyond regulatory baselines. Almost half (49%) of organizations have suffered security/data breaches due to poor GRC, according to Drata.
- Enable better decision-making by surfacing timely, actionable insight on risk and other critical data.
- Increase agility and resilience by continuously identifying, assessing, and prioritizing risk, and adapting to regulatory changes.
“Compliance is a fundamental baseline for many organizations but doesn’t guarantee security. While there is some overlap, today’s security leaders must recognize the need to go beyond what compliance frameworks call for to achieve an extra layer of protection and peace of mind against potentially devastating breaches.”
Chapter 4
What good looks like
All of this sounds great in theory, but what does it look like in practice? Some of the fastest-moving companies are using Tines to automate and orchestrate GRC. Here’s how:
Case studyPath AI
Automating onboarding and offboarding for compliance at scale
“Before, no matter what, something would go wrong and break. Now, it’s all automated. It’s given me a source of truth to expand on and made us seem way more organized - honestly because we are. We just get to enter a form, and it’s done!”
Before Tines
- Before Tines, PathAI faced a high risk of non-compliance due to inconsistent, manual onboarding and offboarding processes.
- Their YAML + Python setup was fragile, error-prone, and lacked reporting or audit logs.
After Tines
- Rapid, compliant onboarding and offboarding.
- Improved repeatability and audibility.
- Enhanced reporting and error logging.
- Saved 45 minutes per onboarding request.
Key workflow
PathAI ensures compliance and auditability with Tines
PathAI replaced a fragile YAML + Python setup with a compliance-driven onboarding workflow built in Tines. The process starts with a Tines form behind SSO, validates the new hire, assigns the right access, logs actions in Jira, and creates audit-ready records. The same approach now powers offboarding – enabling scheduled access revocation across departments, even during mass layoffs or urgent exits.
Case studyDruva
Scaling security operations with automation
“To have workflows that stitch all our tools together, that became a force multiplier.”
Before Tines
- Druva’s security analysts were overwhelmed with manual tasks – ranging from Jira queries to compliance checks and data enrichment.
- Repetitive processes slowed innovation and made it hard to scale.
After Tines
- Fully automated workflows.
- Unified interface to manage detection and response.
- Removed barriers to innovation, scalability, and compliance.
- Saved 1–2 hours per analyst per week.
Key workflow
Druva removes barriers to innovation with time-saving workflows
Using Tines, Druva automated key workflows across vulnerability management, compliance, enrichment, and customer sales requests. Without relying on heavy engineering resources, the team automated Jira reporting, email alerts, security data enrichment, credential management, and API integrations – all from a single interface.
Case studyTines at Tines
Achieving SOC 2 compliance in record time
“We were able to pull all of this information together ourselves. Our engineers could continue with their regular operations – they weren’t even aware it was happening.”
The challenge
- Manual evidence collection and reporting for SOC 2 audits threatened to consume over 250 hours of IT and engineering time.
The solution
- Automated evidence collection with Tines and Drata.
- No engineering involvement required.
- SOC 2 compliance achieved in just four months.
- Saved 250+ hours of manual work.
What we automated
The Tines team automated two high-effort audit areas:
- Endpoint compliance evidence collection using Drata and Tines integrations—even without direct vendor support.
- GitHub production change tracking, surfacing 7,000+ code merges in an organized, audit-ready format – without custom scripts or engineering effort.
Find out more ↗ about how Tines used Tines to achieve SOC 2 compliance.
Ready to automate and orchestrate GRC? A checklist:
If you’re ready to transform your GRC program through automation and orchestration, use this checklist to get started:
Why security teams choose Tines for GRC automation
Reduces human error
By standardizing evidence collection and task execution, Tines minimizes the risk of mistakes like pulling the wrong data.
Designed for modern frameworks
Tines helps automate a wide range of compliance processes across frameworks like SOC 1, SOC 2, GDPR, CCPA, PCI, ISO 27001, NIST, and CIS/SANS controls.
Improves visibility and trust
Tines makes it easier to confirm tasks are done correctly, increasing confidence across audits, teams, and stakeholders.
Connects the dots across your tech stack
Tines integrates with the tools you already use to embed GRC into your broader security automation strategy.
Accessible for the whole team
Anyone on your team can build and run workflows – no engineering support or custom scripting required.
Simplifies compliance procedures
Automating manual GRC tasks with Tines saves time and resources, while ensuring a consistent, systematic approach.
Secure by design
Built by security practitioners, Tines helps every team operate with the highest standards of privacy and protection.
Chapter 5
Popular technologies and workflows
GRC tools commonly used with Tines
Tines connects to any tool with an API – but some tools are particularly popular for GRC:
Drata
Threat intelligence cloud platform enabling organizations to identify and mitigate threats across cyber, supply-chain, physical, and fraud domains.
RegScale
A modern compliance platform purpose-built for real-time compliance and continuous controls monitoring. Utilizing Tines with RegScale streamlines regulatory processes and enhances operational efficiency.
Vanta
A leading automated security and compliance platform that helps companies achieve and maintain compliance standards. Leveraging Tines with Vanta streamlines security workflows, enhances threat detection, and ensures continuous audit readiness.
Pre-built workflows
The Tines Library offers over 1000 pre-built workflows with over 60 built to suit your unique GRC requirements. These stories help teams automate common tasks like:
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Test drive the full-library for free by signing up today for Tines Community Edition
Conclusion
Getting started with modernizing GRC
As digital transformation accelerates, regulatory complexity is becoming a major obstacle. Over 77% of global organizations say compliance challenges have negatively impacted them – and in 2024 alone, more than 1.3 billion breach notifications were issued in the US.
Despite the high stakes, most GRC programs still lag behind. Fewer than two in five organizations consider theirs close to maturity.
Tines offers a better way forward. By orchestrating and automating manual processes, security teams can strengthen risk management, streamline compliance, and free up time for higher-impact work – all without burning out your team or adding headcount.
Whether you’re building from scratch or scaling what’s already working, Tines helps you move faster, stay compliant, and reduce risk.
Sign up for the always-free Community Edition of Tines at tines.com/community-edition.
Learn more about Tines for GRC.
Sign up for the webinar
Join Tines, Dragos, and RegScale on September 3rd for practical insights on modernizing GRC in regulated environments.
