The Real Risk in GRC Migration

Intentionally or otherwise, AI has set the stage for a major transformation in corporate governance.

At the same time, companies are facing a forced migration in their governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) platforms. Oracle GRC is already near end-of-life, and SAP GRC 12.0 ends mainstream support at the end of 2027.

Companies no longer have a choice about modernizing their GRC tooling. However, they can choose to take this opportunity to streamline their governance programs rather than do the bare minimum to adopt the latest set of tools. This both enhances overall security posture and positions the organization to implement the continuous compliance monitoring that regulators increasingly expect.

A like-for-like mentality passes on technical debt

Faced with the newest generation of GRC tools, many companies may treat the change as a “lift and shift” operation. This mindset implements the same roles, rules, and workflows in a new tool.

Decade-old rulesets and access models don’t meet the needs of modern businesses. Key drivers of GRC evolution include:

• Cloud Migration: When moving SAP from on-prem to the cloud, many organizations were caught off guard by changes in billing and management. From a one-time license for a self-managed solution, companies switch to consumption- or user-based pricing, with shared responsibility and ownership for the solution.
• SaaS Sprawl: In the past, a single ERP solution would manage most aspects of the business. Today, standalone SaaS solutions (Salesforce, Workday, etc.) address various governance stages, introducing complexity and dependence on integrations and connectors.
• Cloud Infrastructure Access: Governance is no longer limited to ERP and SaaS applications. Critical business processes now depend on cloud platforms and infrastructure services, where excessive permissions, machine identities, and misconfigured access can create risks that traditional application-centric GRC tools were never designed to address.
• Evolving Cyber Threats: Legacy access control models were based on the assumption that most threats originated from outside the enterprise. Remote work, social engineering, and supply chain attacks allow malicious users to slip behind these defenses.
• Enhanced Regulatory Requirements: New and updated regulations require organizations to strictly control access to sensitive customer data. Compliance requires both implementing the necessary controls and proving that they’re effective on a continuous basis.

Companies can choose to import existing rule sets and policies into new tools, carrying over existing technical debt. However, this comes at the cost of increased business risks, exposure to fraud, and significant threats to operational resilience.

What’s changed in GRC?

Corporate governance has evolved significantly since the last generation of GRC tools was designed and produced. Some of the most significant changes include:

• SaaS Adoption: Companies are increasingly dependent on an array of SaaS solutions. As a result, the major access risks now span a growing number of applications, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday.
• Cloud NHIs: Traditional GRC tools were often human-centric, focusing on managing users’ access and the associated risks. These legacy tools overlook service accounts, API keys, and OAuth tokens, which pose an ever-growing risk as automated workflows and AI expand.
• AI Agents: AI agents are autonomous systems that perform complex, business-critical tasks with little or no human oversight. These tools pose different threats than human users, such as the potential for prompt injection that can trick a trusted tool into taking actions that harm the business.
• Cross-App Access Risks: Legacy GRC tools focused on implementing segregation of duty (SoD) rulesets within a single application. Automated and agentic workflows now introduce SoD conflicts that span multiple apps and can’t be effectively managed by single-app controls.
• Continuous Audit Pressure: The rapid evolution of corporate IT environments means regulatory snapshots are almost immediately out of date. As a result, regulators increasingly require continuous monitoring and data to prove compliance with regulatory requirements.

Key considerations before choosing a path

The shift in GRC tooling presents an opportunity to replace legacy solutions with tools designed to meet the business's evolving needs. Some key considerations when evaluating and selecting solutions include:

• Convergence: Operating standalone tools for identity governance and administration (IGA) and GRC increases management overhead and harms visibility. Tools that converge the two functions into a single platform simplify regulatory compliance.
• Multi-App SoD: Single-app SoD rule sets are no longer sufficient for complex, automated workflows. A governance tool must be able to identify conflicts across multiple tools within a single control plane.
• NHI Visibility: NHIs already outnumber human users within most environments, and this divide will continue to grow. GRC toolsets should be able to govern service accounts and machine identities with a clear understanding of the unique risks and threats that they pose to the business.
• AI Readiness: AI agents are increasingly autonomous and trusted with sensitive data and business-critical workflows. While many GRC platforms include support for AI agents, not all do so holistically, addressing the full range of potential security and compliance risks.
• Identity-Centric Governance: In the past, governance was application-centric, with individual SoD rule sets enforced for each app. Modern governance is identity-centric, where identity serves as the control plane across applications, SaaS, infrastructure, non-human identities, and AI agents.
• Continuous Visibility: AI and automation accelerate both IT infrastructure changes and cyberattacks. Ongoing monitoring and automated remediation are essential for compliance and protection against fast-paced attacks.
• Audit-Ready Evidence: Growing regulatory complexity makes proving ongoing compliance more difficult than ever. Platforms should offer automated, templated report generation for SOX, SOC2, and other major regulations and standards.

Modern AAG is the modernization path

Companies are facing a forced upgrade to their GRC tools as SAP and Oracle replace legacy solutions with ones designed for the modern business. This is an opportunity for organizations to modernize access governance across the board by selecting tools that meet the needs of modern environments and close security gaps that past tools were never designed to address.

Cloud computing, SaaS sprawl, or the emergence of AI alone would be enough to dramatically reshape IT environments and their governance. Taken together, the changes are so significant that corporate governance programs need to be redesigned from the ground up using tools built for modern environments, not those of ten years ago.

Legacy governance tools focused on enforcing SoD within a single application, which was a workable approach when companies had a single, all-encompassing ERP system. However, splitting functionality across multiple SaaS apps and introducing new technologies, like cloud and AI, and their associated risks changes the game. Modern IT governance uses identity as the control plane across an organization’s various apps and platforms, enabling consistent and scalable policy enforcement and management.

Addressing today’s governance challenges requires multi-app application access governance (AAG), offering centralized visibility and cross-app SoD enforcement. Agentic AI, evolving IT environments, and SaaS sprawl mean that manual SoD reconciliation processes are no longer effective, scalable, or adequate for regulatory compliance.

A modern governance model leverages the capabilities of modern GRC tooling and incorporates:

• Governance that spans the entire enterprise ecosystem, not just individual applications
• Continuous understanding of risk, not periodic snapshots
• Visibility into all identities, including human, non-human, and AI-driven actors
• Controls that follow business processes across systems, not just within them
• Automation that scales with rapidly changing environments

These requirements are why organizations are moving beyond traditional GRC and adopting modern AAG platforms designed to provide continuous, identity-centric governance across the enterprise.

Saviynt AAG integrates IGA, AAG, ISPM, and JITA into a single platform, enabling organizations to centrally monitor and manage governance across their entire enterprise ecosystem. Our connector ecosystem allows existing role libraries and rulesets to be imported and modernized, streamlining the transition to modern AAG and enabling companies to more easily define and enforce the controls needed to address today’s security threats and compliance requirements.

If you would like to see modern AAG in action, request a demo today.