When security leaders hear “engineering discipline” applied to Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC), the instinct is to brace for more tooling, more headcount, and more infrastructure that needs to be justified to the board.
Government rarely moves first on anything, which is what makes the current change at FedRAMP worth attention. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program is the seal that lets cloud providers sell to federal agencies, and for years it has been synonymous with a particular way of proving security: a very large stack of documents, assessed once, and revisited on an annual cadence.
Every risk discipline carries a habit that outlives its usefulness. In third-party risk management, that habit is the self-attested questionnaire. It is the artifact the whole practice is organized around. A relationship begins, a security questionnaire goes out, the vendor returns a few hundred answers, an analyst reviews them, and the file is closed until next year's cycle. The ritual is so established that it is easy to forget it was built for a smaller, slower, more stable world than the one we operate in now
Engineering teams don’t debate where their source of truth lives. It’s in code. Changes are tracked, reviewed, and deployed through systems designed to create clarity and accountability. GRC has largely operated outside of that model.
In this article, Ayoub Fandi examines how organizations can unlock untapped value in their existing GRC platforms by applying an engineering mindset rather than defaulting to new tools or costly overhauls. Drawing on practical experience, he explores why most GRC platforms remain significantly underused and how data optimization, strategic integrations, and workflow design can transform them from passive documentation systems into active drivers of risk and control execution.
In this latest article, Ayoub Fandi dissects a familiar but rarely challenged flaw in many GRC programs: controls designed to satisfy auditors first and protect the business second. Drawing on real-world examples from access management, vulnerability management, and application security, Fandi argues that compliance-driven control design too often results in security theater and controls that generate clean audit evidence while leaving real risks untouched. He makes the case for flipping that priority, showing how controls built around actual threats and business risk naturally produce compliance as an outcome, not an objective.
In his latest article, Ayoub Fandi breaks down how organisations can overcome fragmented risk and compliance systems by building a unified central data layer. He explains how this approach enables consistency, clarity, and smarter decision-making across modern GRC ecosystems that are too often siloed by tools and disconnected data.