Why We Ditched Excel for a GRC Tool and Never Looked Back

A practical deep-dive into how modern Governance, Risk & Compliance tooling transforms the way security teams operate.

The Problem With "Winging It"

Managing security today is no small feat. You're looping through compliance cycles, chasing threats, keeping management informed, staying secure, and doing all of it without breaking the budget. Security professionals need headspace, the mental bandwidth to focus on what actually matters: real threats, real incidents, real decisions.

That's exactly what a GRC (Governance, Risk & Compliance) tool gives you.

GRC works at the intersection of governance, risk, compliance, and IT security. It automatically pulls evidence, shows what needs to happen in your cloud environment, keeps processes centralized, and lets each stakeholder, including HR, vendor management, and IT, do their thing without creating chaos. By handling the routine, repetitive work, a GRC tool frees your team to focus on the things that actually require human judgment.

The philosophy is simple: implement a GRC tool from day one and build your ISMS on top of a single source of truth.

Excel Is Not the Enemy, But It's Not Built for This

Let's be honest: everything a GRC tool does, you could do in Excel. Manually. With your own hands. The question is, do you want to?

Excel has real strengths. It's fully customizable, flexible, widely available, and familiar to almost everyone. For many organizations it feels "free." But that freedom often turns into a free-for-all.

Anyone who has done risk management or compliance in Excel will recognize this picture:

• Files live on shared drives, get copied, renamed, and versioned endlessly

• Access is inconsistent, some people have it, others don't

• Shadow files appear, each claiming to be "the latest version"

• Fixing one small mistake can take hours, and in infosec, the sheets are always big

• Manual updates mean higher risk of errors and outdated information

• Little to no audit trail: who changed what, when, and why?
  

Excel isn't bad, it's just not built for GRC at scale. GRC isn't just about storing data. It's about control, consistency, confidence, and a reliable audit trail.

Real Risk Management Is Continuous, Not Annual

If you're familiar with ISO 27001, you've seen it: paper risks, risk assessments checked once a year, and risks that exist only on paper. In Dutch, we call this a papieren werkelijkheid, a paper reality. And in security, it's dangerous.

The worst part? The real-world risks that security professionals are actively managing every day never make it into the Excel sheet.

A GRC platform's risk management module keeps risks real and actionable. It lets you create risks within seconds, follow them through a clear workflow, and make them visible to the right people so everyone knows what to do and things actually get fixed.

Here's what a GRC risk module enables:

• AI-assisted vendor risk identification from uploaded documents and questionnaires

• Integration-based risk detection pulling in vulnerabilities and access review findings automatically

• Structured risk assessment with consistent methodology

• JIRA integration for follow-up tickets that connect security to engineering

• Automated management reporting so leadership always has an up-to-date picture

• Risk-to-control mapping that reflects how security is actually managed, not how good the paper reality looks
  

Real risk management is continuous, connected, and actionable. Not a spreadsheet reviewed once or twice per year.

Shadow IT: The Risk You Can't See in Excel

Here's something that happens in almost every organization: employees sign up for tools using their company Google or Microsoft account. It seems harmless, a quick sign-up for an AI tool here, a design app there, a learning platform, a productivity add-on.

Open a GRC tool with SSO integration and you'll quickly see the full picture: hundreds of applications employees are using, most of them unsanctioned, many of them processing company data.

The challenge is real:

• Data scattered across platforms not covered by paid subscriptions

• Applications outside the approved tech stack and outside security review

• Shadow IT creating compliance gaps, data leak risks, and wasted resources

A GRC tool makes this visible. By pulling every SSO-connected application into a single view, you can see what's being used, by how many people, and whether it belongs in your environment. That visibility is the first step toward a well-governed, approved tech stack where sensitive data stays where it should.

Shadow IT isn't just an IT problem. It's a business risk. And you can't manage what you can't see.

Vendor Management: From Tangled Spreadsheets to a Living System

Many organizations still manage vendors in Excel: a list of names, contact info, contracts, and risk ratings. It seems manageable until it isn't. Files become outdated. Ownership becomes unclear. Certificates expire without anyone noticing. And when you're managing multiple compliance frameworks simultaneously, the differences between them can turn your spreadsheet into total mayhem.

A GRC vendor management module changes this entirely. Here's what it enables:

• Vendor risks linked directly to your own risk register, no more managing them in silos

• Automatic addition of new applications to your vendor list as they're discovered

• AI analysis of SOC 2 certificates and security questionnaires to surface potential risks

• Automated reminders when certificates are expiring or reviews are due

• Direct trust center integration so you can see a vendor's compliance posture in real time

• AI-assisted questionnaire responses drawing from information already in the GRC

• Single source of truth for compliance, IT, and vendor teams

Where Excel stores data, a GRC system manages risk, continuously, in real time, with clear ownership at every step.

Where It All Pays Off: The Audit

Everything we've discussed, risk management, shadow IT visibility, vendor governance, evidence collection, comes together at one moment: the audit.

This is where the value of a GRC tool truly shines.

Instead of scrambling to collect evidence, chasing down stakeholders, and sifting through folders of screenshots and spreadsheets, a mature GRC implementation means:

• Auditors get controlled, scoped access directly to the platform

• Evidence is centralized, no email threads, no shared drives, no version confusion

• Non-conformities are recorded directly, linked to controls and corrective actions

• Audit readiness is tracked continuously, not assembled the week before

No spreadsheets. No shadow folders. No last-minute audit stress.

Beyond the audit itself, a GRC platform also supports the broader security operations that keep compliance meaningful day-to-day: MDM management through agent deployment on laptops, security awareness training with tracked participation and outcomes, and external trust portals that let customers see your genuine compliance posture.

The Bottom Line

The common thread across everything in this series is clear:

Excel helps you document compliance. A GRC tool helps you operationally manage it.

If you're a micro-company or non-profit, open-source options like Eramba (community edition) offer a strong starting point. For SMEs and larger organizations that need deeper integrations, automation, and AI-assisted workflows, a platform like Scrut Automation hits the sweet spot on quality and pricing and will genuinely change how your team works.

Start clean. Start from day one. Build your ISMS on a single source of truth and give your security team back the headspace they need to do what they're actually there to do.

Have questions about implementing a GRC tool or want to see how it works in practice? Feel free to reach out, happy to walk you through it.