Solution Perspective by Michael Rasmussen of GRC 20/20
Reviewed by GRC 20/20: Symbiant Delivering Agility to Risk, Compliance & Assurance Processes
Reviewed by Michael Rasmussen of GRC 20/20, Symbiant is a robust, low-cost GRC platform built for agility, automation, and real-world performance.
Content on this page reflects the independent analysis conducted by GRC 20/20 Research in their Solution Perspective on Symbiant.
Symbiant Delivers a GRC Single Source of Truth
Ease of use
Cost of ownership
Unified architecture
Take control of your compliance and risk processes
Move beyond spreadsheets and disconnected systems with a flexible platform that centralises your data, tracks actions, and gives you clear visibility across your organisation.
What Symbiant GRC Does
GRC 20/20 has evaluated the capabilities of the Symbiant solution and finds that it delivers an intuitive and robust GRC management solution to manage the range of risk, compliance, internal control, and assurance activities within an organization. The solution allows organizations increased agility in managing and monitoring risk in the context of today’s demanding requirements and dynamic environments. Clients engage Symbiant to deliver a fully functioning and robust GRC solution and framework with a low licensing cost as well as implementation and maintenance costs. It delivers the ability to analyze GRC information from multiple dimensions while avoiding the mistakes and errors found in trying to do this with documents and spreadsheets. Symbiant automates what were once labor-intensive tasks associated with managing risk. This functionality is essential for eliminating a maze of manual processes, documents, spreadsheets, email, and narrow point solutions.
Where Symbiant GRC has excelled
Organizations state that Symbiant has improved the quality of their GRC- related management, monitoring, and reporting processes across their organization. This improves the organization’s overall visibility into GRC with greater accountability and ownership to manage risks through a single source of truth for all risk, compliance, control, and assurance activities. All of this while eliminating the overhead of managing manual assessment processes encumbered by hundreds to thousands of spreadsheets, documents, and emails.
Clients find that the solution is flexible to adapt to their requirements, has the capabilities needed, allows them to grow and mature their program over time, and is simple and easy to use. Overall, users find the solution was particularly easy to implement and roll out in their organization and across organizations. One client stated,
“The customization options are limitless, so we have been able to chop and change our solution as our frameworks have evolved, with very little additional cost compared to other similar vendors. Their support is also second to none – I have direct access to their support team, who always respond extremely quickly.”
– Michael Rasmussen, GRC 20/20
Foundational Capabilities in Symbiant GRC Software
The Symbiant solution can be implemented to address the complex requirements of a fully functional and broad GRC/enterprise risk management program, or it can be implemented to address very specific risk and compliance needs. Some organizations find that they often start with addressing a specific, narrow risk and compliance need, such as IT security, and find that they expand the Symbiant implementation over time to address a wide range of risk and compliance needs.
Specific capabilities Symbiant delivers that enable organizations in managing risk and
compliance, no matter the scope, are:
Risk management. Symbiant provides an integrated capability in a unified architecture to manage the array of risks in the context of the objectives of the organization. Their core risk management function delivers risk registers, assessments, workshops, controls, policies, incidents/events, along with key risk indicators managed through active dashboards and reports.
Internal control management. Symbiant enables the management and assessment of controls throughout the organization. The control module in
Symbiant enables the definition, assessment, and monitoring of management, process, IT, and other internal controls.
Compliance management. Symbiant delivers a compliance management platform to enable the organization to assess and monitor obligations and requirements across the organization’s processes and functions. Their open architecture allows them to be standard and framework agnostic, allowing the organization to use and adapt what best fits their needs. This allows for different compliance regulations to be tracked, reviewed, and actioned.
Audit & assurance management. With Symbiant, clients enable assurance activities with audit management, action tracking, workpaper management, and assessments. This ties into the risk management module to deliver a risk-based approach to audit planning and execution.
Benefits Organizations Can Expect with Symbiant GRC
Organizations are most likely to move to the Symbiant platform because they found that their manual, document-centric approaches took too many resources to administer, only addressed specific areas of risk, and found things slipping through the cracks because of the continuous barrage of risk and change. Some organizations may choose Symbiant because their existing GRC management platforms were too complex or were too costly in the licensing and administration of the system or did not perform as well as they were on legacy architectures.
Specific benefits organizations can expect from implementing the Symbiant solution are:
- Significant efficiencies in time through automation of workflow and tasks, as well as reporting. Specifically, the time it takes to build reports from documents and spreadsheets now is just a matter of seconds.
- Reduction in errors by automating the validation of risk, compliance, and controls by removing errors from manual processes and reconciliation that was incomplete or incorrectly entered.
- Data integrity with Symbiant being a single source of truth and the system of record for all risk and compliance management information.
- Collaboration and synergies by providing a single platform with a consistent interface to manage risk and interactions – instead of different departments doing similar things in different formats and processes.
- Consistency and accuracy of GRC information, as all functions must conform to consistent processes and information collection. A single solution with a uniform and integrated assessment process and information architecture.
- Accountability with full audit trails of who did what and when; this delivers value in fewer things slipping through the cracks — particularly business managers who have become more accountable for risk in their functions.
- Increased maturity where the risk accountability, appetite, and tolerance are clearly defined, and risk owners are engaged.
- Agility to keep up with the business where the solution is highly agile and adaptable to deal with business and risk change.
- Accessibility and engagement as Symbiant is a centralized platform which means all users have access.
About GRC 20/20 Research, LLC
GRC 20/20 Research, LLC (GRC 20/20) provides clarity of insight into governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) solutions and strategies through objective market research, benchmarking, training, and analysis. We provide objective insight into GRC market dynamics; technology trends; competitive landscape; market sizing; expenditure priorities; and mergers and acquisitions. GRC 20/20 advises the entire ecosystem of GRC solution buyers, professional service firms, and solution providers. Our research clarity is delivered through analysts with real-world expertise, independence, creativity, and objectivity that understand GRC challenges and how to solve them practically and not just theoretically. Our clients include Fortune 1000 companies, major professional service firms, and the breadth of GRC solution providers.
Research Methodology
GRC 20/20 research reports are written by experienced analysts with experience selecting and implementing GRC solutions. GRC 20/20 evaluates all GRC solution providers using consistent and objective criteria, regardless of whether or not they are a GRC 20/20 client. The findings and analysis in GRC 20/20 research reports reflect analyst experience, opinions, research into market trends, participants, expenditure patterns, and best practices. Research facts and representations are verified with client references to validate accuracy. GRC solution providers are given the opportunity to correct factual errors, but cannot influence GRC 20/20 opinion
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