Why SharePoint and Excel Are Dangerous Tools for Risk Management

SharePoint and Excel: Ubiquitous, But Not Built for GRC, Risk and Audit Management

Tools like Microsoft SharePoint and Excel are convenient and familiar, but that’s also their greatest weakness. They never intended to manage complex governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) functions.

Yet many organisations still rely on them to store and manage their most critical audit trails, risk registers, controls, and incident logs.

Here’s why that’s a ticking time bomb:

While SharePoint excels at document collaboration, it lacks the safeguards and structure required for enterprise-level risk and audit management:

• No purpose-built risk logic: SharePoint doesn’t support risk scoring models, audit trails, or compliance frameworks.
• Vulnerabilities at scale: This latest hack proves SharePoint’s on-prem installations are vulnerable even in high-security government settings.
• No native integration: Risks, controls, and incidents remain siloed, with no meaningful connections between them.
• Unstructured and fragmented: There’s no single source of truth; versioning errors and access inconsistencies are common.

Excel: Familiar, But Fatally Flawed for GRC and Audit Management

Many organisations still use spreadsheets to track risk. But Excel is a static, manual tool, prone to errors, difficult to scale, and impossible to audit reliably. 

The top 10 reasons to stop using Excel for risk management: 

1. No real-time data or automated updates
2. No audit trails or change history
3. Error-prone manual entry
4. No ownership, workflows, or accountability
5. No automation of tasks or reminders
6. High risk of version control issues
7. Inflexible to change in frameworks or processes
8. Limited collaboration and transparency
9. No integration with incidents, controls, or audits
10. Not scalable for growing organisations 

What You Need Instead: A Connected, Secure Risk Ecosystem 

Modern risk management requires more than a patchwork of files and folders. It demands: 

• Real-time risk registers with dynamic residual scoring
• Integrated incident management, audit trails, and accountability
• Role-based views, workflows, and automated reminders
• Symbiant connects your data into one unified platform, your single source of truth.
• AI-assisted insights to surface hidden risks and map cascading impacts 

This is what Symbiant provides, a fully integrated, secure and agile GRC, Risk and Audit Management platform trusted by organisations of all sizes worldwide.   

Symbiant Optional AI Assistant

Symbiant’s optional AI Assistant is fully integrated and purpose-trained on real-world risk, audit, and compliance challenges. It understands your data while keeping it secure, helping to surface hidden threats and unidentified risks. It identifies root causes and predicts the consequences of control failures, helping you understand how risks may cascade across your organisation and where additional vulnerabilities could emerge. It effortlessly connects information across business functions,bringing together disconnected data from risk, audit, compliance, and other sources across your organisation, to deliver actionable insights.  

Move Beyond Document Tools. Move Toward Intelligent Risk Management. 

If your risk management strategy relies on spreadsheets or document libraries, you’re not just behind the curve, you’re exposed. Symbiant offers a better way. Fully modular, agile, flexible and easy to embed, Symbiant fits effortlessly around your existing structure, simplifying processes, breaking down silos, adapting to your exact requirements, and scaling seamlessly as your needs evolve. Proven in complex environments, Symbiant has been delivering the most powerful, flexible and affordable GRC and Audit solutions since 1999, starting at just £300/month with 10 user seats*.