Across regulated industries, compliance programs often run on the same platform accountants and bookkeepers have used for decades: a spreadsheet. What began as a practical solution to track activities has become a structural quagmire and a cybersecurity vulnerability.
Toni Meyer, Director of Product Development at SBS CyberSecurity, explains, "No one has a complete, real-time view of compliance status. This makes it nearly impossible to confidently answer a simple question like, are we compliant right now?" That lack of visibility, she adds, is central to the problem.
Meyer and the team of cybersecurity experts at SBS CyberSecurity, a firm with more than two decades of experience working across regulated sectors, notes that organizations continue to rely on tools never designed for the scale or complexity of modern risk environments.
Chad Knutson, CEO and co-founder of SBS CyberSecurity, adds a foundational perspective on how compliance systems evolved. "Regulatory bodies and standards organizations have often distributed control sets in a spreadsheet format. So it has been a way we have consumed compliance requirements for some time. Spreadsheets become more than a tool. It becomes the default language of compliance," he says.
He reinforces that compliance tools have become culturally embedded, not just operationally convenient.
Meyer highlights the deeper behavioral issue driving stagnation. "Businesses get into a state of complacency. Essentially, if it appears to be working, why change it? The problem is that 'working' often means something very different than 'effective,'" she explains.
As compliance programs expand, reliance on spreadsheets and manual workflows leads to fragmentation. Controls, risks, policies, and evidence become distributed across teams and systems, with no unified perspective.
"Spreadsheets and separate workflows are highly prone to duplication, outdated information, and manual errors. In an environment where regulators expect precision and traceability, those weaknesses compound quickly," Meyer says
She adds a critical distinction: "The biggest risk is awareness, or lack thereof. When organizations cannot see how controls connect across systems, compliance becomes a disconnected exercise."
That disconnect extends into operational risk. "If you do not have a good picture of how your technology is working together," Meyer explains, "the biggest risk is not compliance. It is an operational risk. In practice, this means organizations may meet regulatory requirements on paper while remaining exposed in reality."
Knutson notes that complexity is further amplified by fragmented vendor ecosystems. "Too many vendors doing too many disconnected things, creating significant supply chain risk. Without integration, each tool adds another layer of opacity," he says.
At the same time, compliance itself is evolving. It is no longer periodic, but continuous.
"Compliance has moved from a checklist-driven exercise to a continuous process of review and evaluation. Static tools cannot keep pace with dynamic requirements," Knutson explains
Modern governance, risk, and compliance (GRC), therefore, requires a more unified foundation. Meyer explains, "Organizations need centralized visibility, traceability and defensibility, and scalability and adaptability. These are not incremental improvements. They represent a structural shift in how compliance is managed."
Within that shift, according to her, SBS CyberSecurity has increasingly focused on helping organizations move from fragmented oversight to integrated risk management, including through platforms such as TRAC, which is designed to bring controls, risks, and evidence into a unified operational view without adding unnecessary complexity. TRAC further supports this approach by automating traditionally manual risk assessment processes and generating tailored outputs aligned with regulatory requirements, industry best practices, and an organization's strategic objectives.
Knutson emphasizes that compliance alone is not the goal. "Regulatory compliance does not always equal good security, just as good security does not always equal regulatory compliance. The gap between the two is where risk accumulates," he says.
He adds that effective governance requires decision-making clarity. "A good GRC program identifies the major risks, documents decisions about managing those risks, and still understands that there will be some risks you have to accept in order to keep doing business," Knutson explains. "This perspective moves compliance beyond documentation into strategy."
That acceptance of managed risk becomes especially important as cybersecurity and compliance expectations converge. Cyber insurance requirements, for example, are raising baseline expectations across industries.
Knutson also reinforces the distinction between compliance and security outcomes. "Compliance is meant to be the floor of good security for that organization, not the ceiling. A strong audit result does not guarantee protection against threats."
For SBS CyberSecurity, this shift extends beyond traditional regulated sectors.
Looking ahead, Meyer says the organizations that succeed will embed compliance into operational reality rather than treating it as a reporting exercise. "Successful organizations will treat compliance as a strategic capability, not a reactive obligation. This means embedding compliance into daily operations, rather than isolating it as an annual exercise."
Knutson emphasizes the cultural dimension of that transformation. "Organizations that succeed have taken cybersecurity and compliance and made it part of who they are," he says. "This is not a technology upgrade alone. It is an organizational shift."
