The Four Layers of Security GRC Evidence Collection: Making Sense of the Chaos and Reducing Team Stress

Managing Security GRC evidence has never been straightforward. From outdated spreadsheets and manual screenshots to modern AI-assisted tools, teams have grappled with an evolving set of challenges.

Even with technological advances, evidence collection remains a challenge. Larger organizations face scaling issues, fragmented tools, and overlapping mandates. These problems put pressure on compliance professionals tasked with managing the complexity.

This article outlines four patterns we often see in evidence collection workflows. These patterns are not necessarily sequential. In many large organizations, different teams may find themselves operating within one or more of these situations simultaneously.

Which of these sound familiar in your organization?

Manual Chaos

Many organizations still rely on spreadsheets, emails, and shared drives to manage compliance workflows. Teams scramble to gather evidence, often pulling data manually from systems.

It’s tedious. It’s error-prone. And when files get lost or formats clash, it results in rework that consumes precious time. Audit preparation often feels like a fire drill, with last-minute rushes to find that critical file updated months ago.

Framework pressure adds to the workload. Mandates like ISO 27001 and PCI DSS require evidence mapping across overlapping domains, forcing GRC professionals to duplicate their efforts. The result? A culture where compliance to a mandate often feels like an annual sprint rather than a continuous process.

Despite their best efforts, teams frequently find themselves working in silos, battling tight deadlines and stitching together fragmented information.

The Hybrid Shift

Cloud adoption has reshaped IT infrastructure. Security teams now manage on-prem systems alongside cloud-native services, which creates more integration headaches. And compliance workflows have had to adapt.

Some tools help automate evidence collection from simpler, standardized cloud-based systems. But they aren’t able to handle the unique variety of on-prem and proprietary infrastructure.

Custom-written scripts often bridge these gaps, helping teams pull logs and automate data exports. But “temporary” often becomes permanent. When a script breaks (often due to a software update or new regulation) it can bring the entire evidence pipeline to a standstill. Teams end up spending their time fixing brittle tools instead of focusing on strategy.

The Strain of Scaling & Complexity

As multi-cloud environments become the norm, the volume and complexity of evidence grow exponentially.

Ideally, continuous compliance replaces annual checkpoints, and this improves organizational security. Continuous compliance requires constant adaptation, alignment across systems, and vigilance to prevent gaps from emerging.

But too often systems change and logs fail to sync. Tools crash. And evidence doesn’t align with the latest framework requirements. Evidence pipelines need troubleshooting every step of the way.

Overlapping frameworks remain a challenge, with compliance teams manually checking that a single piece of evidence satisfies multiple mandates. For many, it’s a full-time job just ensuring the process doesn’t break down, and compliance professionals often need to take on technical roles, just to keep up.

Persistent Bottlenecks – The Hybrid Compliance “Mesh”

Many GRC platforms promise better integration and real-time monitoring. They do help. But legacy systems remain a stubborn obstacle. GRC platforms generally lack capabilities to work with large-scale and legacy systems. And so evidence collection across proprietary systems and hybrid environments still involves custom scripts and workarounds.

Compliance teams work with a mesh of systems. Some evidence collection is automated. But a lot remains manual or needs custom scripts created by technically capable people. And even basic tasks can require hours of manual intervention. For instance, converting reports from outdated formats into usable evidence. This takes time teams could spend elsewhere.

The pressure of managing patched together workflows and adjusting to framework changes is relentless.

The Strain on Compliance Teams

Across all of these patterns, one reality persists: compliance professionals are under immense strain. Their efforts are critical to organizational security, yet the tools and processes often work against them.

Burnout remains a constant risk, amplified by ongoing technical debt, reliance on script maintenance, and frequent employee turnover. And when departing team members leave, they take critical knowledge of scripts and systems with them, leaving behind knowledge gaps that are often invisible until something breaks.

Teams are doing their best with the tools they have, but the weight of manual mapping, patched together integrations, and never-ending audits takes its toll. Mistakes happen. Organizational security can slip. And in worst case scenarios, breaches happen that could have been prevented.

The Path Forward

The future of Security GRC depends on three key shifts:

• Reducing Technical Debt: Moving away from brittle scripts that break when infrastructure or mandates change, toward flexible, cross-system automation platforms.
• Simplifying Evidence Mapping: Adopting tools that streamline evidence collection and align frameworks seamlessly.
• Supporting Compliance Teams: Providing no-code/low-code solutions that let Compliance teams build robust automations that they otherwise need developers to produce.

Streamlining even one framework mapping can save teams hours every week. For teams working in large enterprises, fully automating evidence collection across on-prem, hybrid, and large-scale proprietary systems leads to:

• Better security results
• Faster audit readiness that keeps up with business needs
• Smoother collaboration across teams
• Less strain on compliance professionals

The evolution of compliance workflows is of progress and persistent challenges. The future won’t be defined by how many tools teams add, but by how well those tools simplify, streamline and integrate with the systems already in place, empowering compliance professionals to own and manage workflows confidently.