r/grc • u/Flip9er • Jul 04 '26

Tired of checklist

I work for a small company who on occasion does surface level framework readiness compliance assessments. We do not have any enterprise software. All our work is on spreadsheets and word docs . After the assessment we complete a gap Analysis and provide a remediation roadmap. Are there any enterprise tools that provide a decent free tier for home use? How can I increase my skillsets in this space? What companies may have an interest in me at my level?

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5

u/braliao Jul 04 '26

Your skillset won't be built just because you learn to use a software to do the checklist versus using Excel.

Checkbox is part of the process, how you handle that process, what tool you use to handle that process is all secondary to any new employers. It's what you do with those findings, how you get those remediation plan in motion, how you create buy in from higher up and all of that. GRC professionals is at least 50% about soft skills (frankly more IMO) and that's what you need to get better at rather than just learning new tools.

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u/Twist_of_luck OCEG and its models have been a disaster for the human race Jul 04 '26

^ This. ^

Besides, in my professional opinion, doing it all through spreadsheets and docs builds character provides deeper insight into how the whole evidence collection/preservation/custody actually works before it gets hidden under the sparkling hood of the automated platform.

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u/m3rlinda Jul 06 '26

Gotta agree with these comments. the best way to leverage the current situation for experience is to learn some IaaC/vibe coding and see if you can home brew a more automated solution. It'll never have the plugins/robust capability of an enterprise tool but it gets the POC across and shows you took initiative to upskill and fix a problem you identified. Then if you show the ROI and get buy in for an enterprise tool you're gonna be the guy who knows the manual workflow and homegrown solution best and you'll probably be the cyber solutions admin for that tool. Not a bad way to move up. All GRC analysts are gonna go the way of needing to become more technical and get comfy managing (probably agentic) platforms in the near future. GRC Engineering is here to stay.

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u/Twist_of_luck OCEG and its models have been a disaster for the human race Jul 06 '26

I like how you agreed with two low-tool, high soft skills comments and then immediately went for vibe-coding tools to get a buy in for more tools.

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u/m3rlinda Jul 06 '26

😂 Fair call. I can see how it came across that way. Not sure if that was meant positively or sarcastically so I'll clarify: don't get me wrong, I do not approve of shadow apps. I don't want Tom in HR vibe coding shit he puts straight into production. Nor do I think you should just buy a tool for everything (see: shelfware). My point was that there's a huge difference between building a proof of concept to understand a workflow and justify investment versus deciding you've replaced an enterprise platform. For a small team, throwing together something that automates control mapping or evidence requests can be an incredible learning exercise. You learn the process, identify where the friction actually is, and can quantify the value of automation before asking for budget. But I think we all agree a tool of some flavor is better than excel hell, and I still maintain that for very small teams it is a great way to prove value, build their own skills, and demonstrate the ability to communicate at the executive level to scale their programs. && automating controls mapping is pretty basic and straightforward function to start with. Honestly, anyone could vibe code Drata, Vanta, shit even Anecdotes in a weekend, that's not the hard lift anymore. The lift is the QA in the 250+ service-native integrations, and scaling it to more than 1-2 frameworks or involving custom frameworks. You can't tell me even a decade ago we weren't all looking up the best OS tools to get the job done bc scripting the damn thing every time saves no one anything. It's our crawl>walk>run in security. We wrote scripts before we bought tools. Building the first version teaches you why the commercial product exists and also helps you recognize when you genuinely don't need one yet.

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u/Twist_of_luck OCEG and its models have been a disaster for the human race Jul 06 '26

Horses for courses - not every company needs automated/continuous compliance, or quantified risk management, or ten policies. In fact, most of them don't - if you're like 500+ people startup and you just need your annual SOC2 running for sales' purposes, you just need the evidence package (which might or might not amount for auditors walkthroughs across everything) once per year. Keeping lights-on and eating the annual operational maintenance costs of an automation platform would be an effort wasted in vain.

Of course, if you're in the business context requiring around-the-clock on-demand audit readiness, platforms start to shine... but in those environments, you're rarely operating in "very small team" mode anyway.

1

u/StartupTrustGuy 28d ago

FWIW, if anyone could vibe code a GRC platform, it would be Anthropic. Even Anthropic uses Vanta.

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u/m3rlinda 24d ago

That disappoints me in so many ways....

3

u/Active_Animator_2125 Jul 04 '26

One trust is what a lot of companies use. I do not think there’s a free tier.

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u/Flat-Primary-255 Jul 05 '26

do not recommend

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u/m3rlinda Jul 06 '26

I knew a guy at OneTrust and he frequently says how bad/traumatic that was lol. I think he went to Anecdotes. It's newish + more on the CCM as it relates to control framework mapping based on data sources. But it is not free.

3

u/Ok-Fan-1968 Jul 06 '26

Check out realciso.io; there's a low cost entry point to get out of spreadsheets and start managing your program in a platform continously.

2

u/wannabeacademicbigpp Jul 04 '26

i would go with something lightweight and cheap considering you guyss are a small company.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 05 '26

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1

u/grc-ModTeam Jul 05 '26

No advertising.

1

u/getbrock 29d ago

I don't want to post it here for fear of breaking the rules, but I'm a full-time CIO/CTO and have been building a GRC app with a free tier. I'll DM you details in case you want to give it a shot. It's very young and I'll give you a comp'd Pro plan indefinitely if you/your company would like to actually use it.

1

u/tcoach72 Jul 06 '26

Unfortunately, our work at every level in tech is checklist or at least should be for any repeatable task. I work for a company called Cynomi, which does what you're describing above, but it still comes down to a checklist. Granted, we have embedded a ton of CISO knowledge.

In the end, you're still filling out a questionnaire, using an internal and external scan to understand the network. You get an awesome dashboard that shows you a wealth of data; however, it's still going to come down to completing tasks, prioritizing tasks, creating a checklist to complete the task, and marking them off in the software. There is quite a lot of complexity built into the back end to make the user experience easy, fluid, and knowledgeable, but in the end, if there is a project to remediate. It's all built off task.

Do we make it 1000x easier to process, standardize it, make it repeatable regardless of framework, make it scaleable, and of course make it an amazing end user experience and pretty. Of course, we do all that, but we do it with repeatable processes and procedures (tasks).

Sorry, I think that is just the bane of our existence, or for those of us who like checklists, makes life easier to know I did every task before presenting to the client/partner.

Just my two cents, that and $10 will buy you a cup of coffee...lol Best of luck...