Why GRC Engineering Is The Future Of Governance, Risk & Compliance

The Future of Compliance Is Built, Not Written

I have written about GRC quite a bit this year

A recurring point I always state in my videos and articles is:

“GRC is for non-technical people,” and “GRC professionals do not need to know coding.”

But .. I think I might have been wrong

If you want to be relevant in the next decade, you DO need to know coding.

Python. Infrastructure as Code. CI/CD pipelines. That’s where governance, risk, and compliance evidence actually lives.

If you want to stay relevant in GRC , you need to be fluent enough to govern the systems that are now driving business.

Because the old world of screenshots and spreadsheets is dead. The future of GRC isn’t documented — it’s engineered.

This is where GRC Engineering comes in

What Is GRC Engineering?

According to the GRC Engineering manifesto:

“GRC Engineering is a step-change evolution in governance, risk, and compliance. It’s more than just GRC + writing code. It’s an engineering mindset, systems thinking, and a customer-centric focus around delivering GRC outcomes.”

In plain terms: GRC engineering treats compliance like an engineering problem.

• Define the rules (your controls).

• Automate the checks (your pipelines).

• Integrate them into CI/CD and cloud platforms.

• Surface real-time evidence for leaders and auditors.

No more screenshot circus. No more annual panic. Just continuous assurance, embedded in the way you ship and operate.

Why Now?

The shift toward GRC engineering isn’t optional. It’s being driven by forces that make the old “annual audit” model unsustainable.

First, release cycles have outpaced audit cycles. In most companies, code gets deployed daily, sometimes hourly. Cloud environments spin up and down by the minute. Infrastructure is ephemeral, and AI systems constantly retrain, update, and change behavior. Trying to govern all that with quarterly reviews and static checklists is like trying to track the weather with last month’s forecast .. you’ll always be behind.

Second, buyers want proof, not promises. Enterprise customers no longer settle for policy binders and generic assurances. They want evidence in real time: control pass rates, uptime metrics, incident closure times, and access attestation reports. If you can’t produce them, you’re not just behind on compliance.. you’re losing deals. In many industries, GRC engineering has become a revenue enabler, as it enables startups and enterprises to demonstrate trust instantly, rather than after weeks of scrambling.

Third, regulators have raised the bar.

• NIST CSF 2.0 moves away from “box-checking” and emphasizes measurable outcomes.

• ISO Standards are forcing closer alignment between risks and controls, demanding traceability between what you say and what you do.

• PCI DSS 4.0 requires continuous evidence of controls for cardholder environments. The era of once-a-year screenshots is over.

Finally, budgets are tighter than ever. With fewer people and rising audit demands, automation is the only realistic way forward. Instead of armies of consultants gathering screenshots, APIs now deliver evidence continuously and at scale. “API over eyeballs” isn’t just a slogan — it’s survival.

Put simply, the speed of change, customer expectations, regulatory pressure, and financial realities are converging. GRC engineering is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s the only way to keep up.

What a GRC Engineering Environment Looks Like

A GRC-engineered environment feels very different from traditional compliance. Instead of a scramble before audit season, governance and assurance are baked into the daily flow of engineering and operations.

Imagine a customer sends over a standard SOC 2 request:

“Please provide evidence of encryption for all production data stores.”

Old World:
The security team scrambles. Someone emails cloud admins for screenshots. Another person digs through old Jira tickets. Weeks go by, screenshots are stitched into a PDF, and by the time it reaches the customer, half the data is outdated. The audit clock is ticking, and trust is already strained.

GRC-Engineered World:
The request is answered in minutes. The compliance dashboard already tracks encryption coverage across AWS, Azure, and GCP through continuous API checks. The team exports a report showing 100% compliance with timestamped evidence, plus auto-remediation logs for past violations. The customer gets confidence instantly — not weeks later.

That’s the difference. In the old world, compliance is reactive and painful. In a GRC-engineered world, compliance is proactive, continuous, and becomes a trust accelerator.

Controls aren’t buried in Word documents — they’re codified into infrastructure templates, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud policies. A pull request that introduces a vulnerable dependency or an unencrypted storage bucket won’t pass review, because the control is enforced automatically. Compliance checks run alongside unit tests, making governance part of the same workflow developers already use.

The cloud environment itself is self-reporting. Misconfigurations are automatically flagged, sometimes auto-remediated, and logged as evidence for future reference. Backups, restores, and disaster recovery drills produce artifacts by default, stored as timestamped audit evidence. Joiner-mover-leaver processes are orchestrated through the identity provider and HR system, with approvals, logins, and removals all captured automatically.

Risk dashboards are as real-time as uptime dashboards. Instead of a red-yellow-green chart that hides more than it shows, you see live indicators: backlog age of critical vulnerabilities, percentage of automated control coverage, RTO evidence from the last failover test, or number of privileged accounts without active tickets. Risks aren’t abstract — they’re tied directly to business impact and system telemetry.

For leadership, this environment feels predictable. Instead of being surprised by audit findings or customer questionnaires, they get a steady rhythm of reports showing control pass rates, time-to-remediate, and exception trends. For engineers, compliance is no longer a separate burden. It’s invisible guardrails that keep them moving fast without derailing into regulatory risk.

This is the essence of GRC engineering: governance, risk, and compliance transformed from static paperwork into living, automated systems. It’s not just about passing audits. It’s about building trust at the speed of software.

The Skills GRC Pros Need Now

This is where careers change.

If you were once rewarded for memorizing ISO clauses, tomorrow you’ll be rewarded for things like:

• Writing a Python script to check AWS IAM password policies.

• Encoding encryption requirements into Terraform.

• Querying API logs for real-time access evidence.

• Understanding prompt injection risks in agentic AI pipelines.

The GRC pro of the future isn’t just a checklist auditor. They’re a compliance engineer — part risk analyst, part automation architect.

The good news is that you do not need to start becoming a part-time coder to get good at GRC engineering. This is where vibe coding and MCP come in.

Vibe Coding and MCP: The Next Leap in GRC Engineering

The story doesn’t end with automation. Emerging paradigms like vibe coding and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) are making GRC engineering even easier and more accessible.

• Vibe coding allows developers — and even non-developers — to build applications by describing goals in natural language instead of writing full code. Imagine saying: “Build me a compliance dashboard that tracks IAM misconfigs and shows trend lines” — and having an AI agent generate the first working version. GRC pros don’t need to be full-time engineers; they just need fluency to guide these systems toward secure, compliant outcomes.

• MCP (Model Context Protocol) enables AI agents to plug into organizational systems (like ticketing, logging, or cloud APIs) in a standardized, secure way. Instead of manually wiring integrations, GRC engineers will soon be able to direct AI agents to “collect IAM activity logs” or “test DR failover,” and the agent will handle the details.

Together, vibe coding and MCP lower the barrier to entry for technical GRC. They let professionals focus on what needs to be governed while AI handles the repetitive “how.”

That’s the next frontier: GRC engineering not just as a skillset, but as a collaborative workflow with AI.

The checklist auditor is gone. The compliance engineer is here. And soon, the compliance engineer will have AI copilots that make governance as easy as describing the outcome you want.

Thanks for reading this !

If you want to learn more about Vibe Coding and how it can help you understand GRC Engineering then check out my new course below

How To Get This Course

There are two ways you can get this course

• DISCOUNTED LINK: You can buy my course on Udemy with an early bird discount by clicking on this link (valid for 5 days)

• FREE: If you are a paid annual subscriber, you get it for FREE. Thanks for supporting this newsletter !

Just click on the link below to redeem the voucher and enroll in my new course

Do not forget to leave a review !