Risk at Enterprise Scale Has Evolved

The digital risk landscape has changed more in the last five years than in the prior twenty. In 2025, enterprise-scale organizations face a new era of complexity, where cyber threats are more persistent, regulations more stringent, and ecosystems more distributed. The average organization now relies on hundreds (or thousands) of third parties and vendors. Cloud-first environments are the default. And the stakes for missteps—whether from a breach, audit failure, reputational harm, or operational disruption—are higher than ever.

That’s why leading organizations are rethinking the way they approach business risk management, corporate compliance and risk management, and cybersecurity risk management. They’re moving away from siloed, reactive processes and toward integrated, scalable, and automated business risk management solutions that support security at the speed of business and enhance their risk management efforts.

In this guide, we’ll break down:

What “enterprise scale” really means in today’s context
The evolving challenges facing security and risk leaders
What best-in-class risk, compliance, and cybersecurity solutions look like in 2025
Tools, frameworks, and best practices to modernize your approach

What Defines “Enterprise Scale” in 2025?

Before diving into solutions, it’s important to define what “enterprise scale” really entails in 2025. It’s more than just company size or headcount. Enterprise-scale risk requires different tooling, governance, and strategy because of the increased velocity, volume, and variability of digital operations.

Characteristics of Enterprise-Scale Risk:

Extensive third-party ecosystems: Most large companies now rely on hundreds of third-party vendors—our latest Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) Impact Report shows that the average company’s vendor inventory has grown by 21% year-over-year. These growing ecosystems include cloud providers, managed service providers (MSPs), and SaaS platforms. The interconnectivity of that extended network greatly increases the threat surface to protect. Risk management for business extends far beyond internal infrastructure.
Multiple business units with decentralized IT: Enterprises operate across geographies, subsidiaries, and divisions—each potentially introducing unique technologies and risk profiles. Additionally, each business unit often has its own procurement processes, which amplifies the inherent risk of third-party vulnerabilities.
Regulatory complexity: Large organizations are subject to overlapping compliance obligations across regions and industries—GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, PCI-DSS, SOX, and new SEC cybersecurity risk reporting mandates are just a few, and many companies are subject to multiple compliance frameworks (in addition to industry-specific regulatory frameworks that may apply to your business).
Board-level risk scrutiny: Cybersecurity and compliance have become executive and board priorities. Visibility and accountability are no longer optional.
Need for scale and speed: Manual processes break down under the volume of assessments, audits, and control-tracking required at enterprise scale. Traditional resource investment—like headcount—is costly and often still fails to keep up with the risk management process.

In short, enterprise-scale risk programs must be automated, scalable, and integrated across teams and systems to remain effective.

The Challenges Facing Enterprise Risk, Compliance, and Security Teams

Despite increased investment in security and compliance, many enterprise programs remain reactive, fragmented, or overly dependent on manual processes. These factors leave enterprise security risk management teams exposed to some common pain points, including:

Disconnected Systems and Silos
Risk data is often spread across departments, spreadsheets, SharePoint drives, GRC platforms, and vendor portals. This makes it very difficult (read: almost impossible) to get a unified, real-time view of the organization’s risk posture.
Assessment Bottlenecks
Security questionnaires, compliance checklists, and vendor assessments pile up faster than teams can process them. Even with large InfoSec teams, review cycles lag, and critical decisions are delayed. This is largely because most questionnaire-based assessments are still very manual for both vendors and risk professionals.
Redundant Vendor Interactions
Vendors are inundated with duplicative assessment requests from different business units. This causes fatigue and introduces friction into the procurement and vendor onboarding processes. Enterprise vendor risk management is critical to streamline this process, helping avoid operational delays due to business units being unable to quickly and safely implement the tools they need.
Outdated Tooling
Traditional GRC tools can provide a single solution to assist with managing broad organizational risk. But they were not built for the pace and scale of modern business risk management—especially when it comes to their third-party risk modules. These TPRM modules often require a lengthy implementation process, are hard to customize to the rapidly changing needs of your vendor ecosystem, require additional organizational expertise to maintain and support, and often lack the integrations needed to fit into today’s cloud-first environments.
Regulatory Fatigue
Staying compliant with multiple frameworks is a challenge in itself—especially as new rules emerge. As we mentioned previously, compliance regulation is changing rapidly at a global scale, which can be a strain on existing resources. Many companies regularly conduct risk assessments, such as SOC 2 audits, to demonstrate compliance and build trust with consumers, but this process is also involved, detailed work for your risk teams.

Strategic Solutions: What Enterprise-Ready Risk Management Looks Like

To manage enterprise-scale risk effectively, leading organizations are turning to solutions that orchestrate complex workflows, not simply automate tasks. This means tools that connect the dots between third-party risk, internal control mapping, compliance obligations, and executive reporting—across multiple business units.

Here’s how best-in-class programs are structuring their solutions:

End-to-End Lifecycle Management

Instead of managing vendor risk assessments in isolation, enterprises are deploying solutions that manage the full lifecycle:

Vendor intake: At the moment a business unit requests a vendor, an inherent risk survey is triggered. This prevents costly delays later in the procurement process and increases efficiency by identifying risk factors early.
Auto-tiering and routing: Based on risk factors (such as the types and volumes of data the vendor will access or the criticality of that vendor to business operations), the vendor is automatically assigned to a tier. This allows your risk management teams to better allocate resources consistently based on similar risk profiles.
Assessment selection: With risk organized into tiers, it’s possible to assign the proper assessment (rather than employing a more labor-intensive “one-size-fits-all” approach). Low-risk vendors undergo a lightweight review, while medium and high-risk vendors undergo increasingly more stringent assessments based on your own compliance or corporate risk management requirements.
Review and scoring: Implement automated, AI-assisted workflows to evaluate responses and flag gaps based on the security evidence you collect from vendors (this can come in a wide variety of document types and include audit reports like SOC 2 or ISO). These automated reports are shared in a centralized system that alerts the proper teams for review (for example, engaging Legal or Compliance teams or providing reporting to senior management).
Approval workflow: If risk is acceptable, approval is logged and procurement continues. If remediation is needed, tickets are created and tracked. Part of this portion of the process also entails providing recommendations to vendors that need to address key gaps or remaining assessment questions.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

Risk and compliance don’t live in a vacuum. Best-in-class business risk management software platforms break down silos between:

Procurement—Owns the sourcing process and may work closely with (or even oversee) third-party risk management teams
Legal—Manages contracts and liability
Security—Evaluates technical and cybersecurity risk
Compliance—Ensures alignment with regulatory frameworks and adherence to regulatory standards
Executives—Own risk appetite aligned to business objectives and oversight of execution

With centralized platforms, these teams operate from a shared workspace with defined responsibilities, visibility, and workflows—so nothing gets lost in email threads or disconnected spreadsheets.

Integrated Assessment, Auditing, and Evidence Management

Rather than scramble to gather audit documentation every year, or send manual questionnaires every time you need to assess or reassess a vendor, enterprise platforms provide:

Evidence repositories tied to controls; this allows you to centralize important documentation that is regularly used to satisfy auditors or that can be used to begin a regularly scheduled assessment of a vendor.
Expiration tracking for vendor certifications, so you can maintain visibility into the cadence of assessments or audits to ensure you have the proper resource allocation to satisfy your need—rather than scrambling or working long hours at the last minute.
Audit logs showing who reviewed what, when, and why for greater visibility and to document due diligence in the event of a security incident.
Cross-mapped controls that tie one mitigation to multiple frameworks in order to reduce duplicative work and maximize resources.

This dramatically reduces audit prep time and improves regulatory compliance confidence.

What Best-in-Class Business Risk Management Looks Like in 2025: Functional Areas to Align

Modern enterprise cybersecurity and compliance programs unify efforts across several interconnected disciplines:

1. Third-Party Risk Management
TPRM is the front line of defense. Enterprises are adopting platforms that automate vendor assessments, enable proactive vendor sharing of security documentation, and facilitate cross-functional risk mitigation strategies. Integration with procurement, legal, and larger GRC systems ensures risk decisions happen early—before contracts are signed.

2. Cybersecurity and InfoSec Operations
The best platforms align with internal security frameworks (e.g., NIST, CIG, ISO or customized frameworks) and allow InfoSec teams to:

Track and prioritize vulnerabilities
Review vendor controls efficiently
Respond to incidents with visibility into interconnected systems

3. Compliance and Audit Readiness
Enterprise programs are building compliance libraries to map controls across frameworks. This reduces duplication when responding to ISO, SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI, and other compliance controls audits. Automated evidence collection and renewal alerts reduce audit scramble.

4. Executive and Board-Level Risk Reporting
Dashboards that tie cybersecurity KPIs to business outcomes help translate technical risk into business language. Here are just a few examples of metrics to track for executive reporting:

The percentage of critical vendors with complete assessments
Risk reduction trends over time; this may be the number of security incidents experienced, but you may also have some internal metrics that tell a more nuanced story about your own risk-reduction efforts
Time-to-resolution for flagged issues
ROI for investment in risk-management solutions such as TPRM platforms

The Role of AI in Enterprise Risk and Compliance Programs

AI has moved beyond buzzword territory—it’s reshaping how enterprises operate risk and compliance programs. But to deliver value at scale, AI tools must support context-aware intelligence that complements human expertise.

How does this work when it comes to enterprise cyber risk management? AI makes it possible to dramatically reduce the manual and administrative tasks that come along with risk management and free up valuable time, resources, and expertise for more business-critical taks—like actually managing and mitigating risk (rather than managing complex systems and disjointed documentation).

Whistic data shows that 77% of security breaches in the last three years were the result of third-party vulnerability. Given the scale of third-party risk, let’s take a look at how AI can be applied to enterprise vendor risk management as an example of where this new technology fits into a modern approach.

The Challenges of Traditional TPRM

Traditional, or “legacy”, TPRM relies exclusively on a questionnaire-based approach to collecting and analyzing security data to make risk-based decisions about a vendor or to ensure regulatory compliance. While security questionnaires are thorough, they are also often lengthy and require manual effort to complete. The manual steps include:

Locating specific supporting security documentation, which can be housed in myriad different locations or systems and is often dated or inaccurate
Combing through documentation to identify specific evidence or controls
Relying on InfoSec to keep answer libraries up to date or personally oversee assessments, creating a chokepoint in the process
Doing the work yourself; companies doing the assessment as part of due diligence are often left parsing through documentation themselves after receiving reams of raw security data from a vendor looking to reduce their own time burden.

As a result of these hurdles, many companies are simply not able to assess the number of vendors they’d like—94% of companies report that they would assess more vendors if they had the proper time and resources to do so. And 97% say they would do a more detailed assessment if they could.

In short, manual, “legacy” TPRM is creating the potential for greater risk in almost every company.

How AI Creates Modern TPRM

Simply put, AI is the engine of modern third-party risk management because it automates the most time-consuming and resource-intensive part of vendor security assessments. It eliminates the need for a solely questionnaire-based, highly manual approach. That leads to three key outcomes:

Reduced costs. By reducing the time necessary to assess your vendors, AI-powered TPRM dramatically lowers the cost-per-assessment, dollars that can be reinvested in other areas of your enterprise risk management program.
Improved decision-making. AI makes it possible to do a deeper, richer assessment of your vendors in less time, giving your procurement and risk teams better insight and helping them make smarter decisions about your third-party investments (smarter investments also reduce costs, as a nice bonus).
Better risk outcomes. With the capacity to perform more in-depth assessments on more vendors, you greatly reduce the inherent risk you take on from your vendor ecosystem and improve risk response and risk mitigation outcomes long after the assessment is complete. And the time savings for your risk team can be redeployed to better manage, mitigate, and respond to risks, improving risk outcomes long after the assessment is complete.

In practice, AI accomplishes these goals specifically by helping teams:

Utilize more risk data. Risk intelligence traditionally comes through the security questionnaire; this can be an established framework or a customized questionnaire, but it forces information through a narrow, manual funnel. But risk data can be found in a number of other sources: risk rating services, trust centers, policy documents, audit reports, white papers—all in addition to questionnaires and standards. AI allows companies to use this kind of information early in the process to complete an assessment.
Synthesize intelligence to create a clear picture of risk. AI measures risk and responds to security questions based on the framework you choose for the assessment. For example, if your business relies on the SIG standard, AI will source responses and evidence from available documents based on that standard. This helps you understand in minutes what might otherwise have taken weeks to ascertain.
Lead with trust and transparency. With the right solution, AI-based TPRM not only provides answers to security queries, but it also provides rationale for its responses. Whistic’s AI capabilities, for example, provide a confidence score, full rationale based on evidence, and a direct link to answer sources for every response. This allows you to lean into automation with trust, saving your human expertise for exceptions or gaps.

Whistic’s Approach to AI-First TPRM

The Whistic Platform uses a suite of AI capabilities integrated into TPRM workflows across the assessment lifecycle. This suite is called Assessment Copilot, and it works in four key ways:

Vendor Summary. This feature allows you to conduct a full automated assessment against the framework of your choice (Whistic comes with access to more than 50 of the most commonly used standards and frameworks, but you can also use your own customized control framework). Copilot will utilize whatever documentation you’ve approved for use to source responses in minutes. It will then generate a report that shows complete and compliant responses, unknown responses, non-compliant responses. Each response has a rationale, confidence score, and citations, so you can focus on the handful of non-compliant or unknown responses.
SOC 2 Summary. This allows you to use the information from a full SOC 2 audit report (which can often run to more than 100 pages) to generate a five-page summary attuned to your specific controls. This makes it easy to extract the right information, and the resulting summary can also be shared with other stakeholders easily. With nothing more than a SOC 2 report, AI can answer more than 70% of the questions in the NIST-based Whistic Control Framework in minutes.
Vendor Insights. This makes it possible to query your entire vendor inventory at one time to extract macro insights from your third-party ecosystem. This is especially useful if there is a widespread threat that may affect a wide range of your vendors (as with the recent Crowdstrike outage), helping you to see at a glance which vendors may be impacted. You can also use Vendor Insights if you experience any changes to your risk profile that may have a vendor-wide impact.
Smart Response. Copilot supports both sides of the TPRM assessment process. Smart Response allows vendors who receive high volumes of assessment requests to automatically respond using approved documentation in an InfoSec-controlled knowledge base. Smart Response understands question intent, so it can even automate responses to customized questionnaires.

Best Practices for Enterprise-Scale Risk and Compliance in 2025

Before we go, let’s take a look at some of the best practices that can be adopted to ease the transition to modern, enterprise-level risk management based on some of the key stakeholders involved.

For Procurement Teams

Procurement needs speed—but also assurance. Best practices to ensure efficiency and due diligence include:

Built-in risk checks at request intake. This means that the assessment process should be initiated as a standard practice on initial engagement with a vendor. This process should include a very brief risk survey to determine the types and volumes of data the vendor will access, along with the criticality of the vendor to operations. This will help you immediately determine a risk tier and risk evaluation type. If you use a modern, AI-first approach, this should also include a list of documents that are necessary to complete an automated assessment so the vendor can send those right away.
Pre-approved vendor lists based on past assessments so you don’t have to duplicate work or reinvent the wheel for a vendor you’ve worked with in the past. You may simply need to send an abbreviated questionnaire along to address any emerging risks or exceptions that may have arisen since your last contact with the vendor.
Integration with contract workflows, so a vendor can’t be onboarded unless risk review is complete. This helps to ensure a standard, repeatable, scalable risk management plan, for procurement from risk tiering to automated assessment through contracting.

These best practices reduce procurement delays, create better alignment with security standards, and support business units.

For Legal and Compliance

Legal wants contracts to reflect the organization’s risk tolerance, maximize value, ensure high service levels, and address potential liability. That means they need:

A standardized data processing agreement (DPA) to ensure the use of personal or sensitive data is compliant with privacy regulation.
Automated tracking of liability clauses to ensure that responsibility for any incident or service outage is properly allocated; this may also include specific language around disaster recovery or incident response plans.
Notifications for expiring certifications or pending audits allowing InfoSec and risk teams to understand and anticipate timelines for any necessary reassessment.

Compliance teams benefit from dashboards showing:

Framework coverage (e.g., how many vendors meet ISO/SOC/NIST or the framework you choose/require for cybersecurity risk management).
Control gaps needing remediation to understand resource allocation, establish timelines, and better measure risk against business appetite and value.
Evidence readiness for audits, especially for high-risk or business-critical vendors that may need to be assessed with greater scrutiny more often.

These best practices help Legal and Compliance to deliver more consistent contracts and faster audit prep while also maintaining lower legal exposure.

For Security and InfoSec

Security teams need insight into:

Vendor access to the kinds and volumes of data vendors can access, as well as the systems they can access.
Where encryption or MFA is missing.
Who owns remediation, what is the appropriate cadence for regular assessments based on risk levels, and what’s coming up and what’s overdue.

Best practices include:

Dashboards for open security risks by tier to inform monitoring risks and remediation efforts.
AI-driven assessment scoring to improve the speed of the assessments and provide more real-time information into risk.
One-click exports for exec briefings or cyber incident response to improve stakeholder visibility, drive alignment, and measure progress against overall business goals.

This allows Security teams to deliver faster responses, maintain close alignment with business outcomes, and create greater visibility of security posture.

For Executives and Boards

Executives need clarity, not spreadsheets. Modern programs:

Tie cyber metrics to business outcomes (e.g., risk-adjusted onboarding timelines, breach avoidance).
Highlight trends over time (e.g., percentage of critical vendors assessed each quarter, changes in overall assessment time).
Provide narrative risk reporting with AI-summarized insights that focus on the most critical intelligence. The reporting capabilities in the Whistic Platform we discussed earlier are a great way to deliver these kinds of high-impact reports.

These steps lead to stronger alignment between technical controls and strategic priorities.

The Future of Enterprise Risk and Compliance: What to Expect Next

Looking ahead, enterprise risk and cybersecurity programs will continue to evolve from isolated functions to core components of strategic business enablement. Here are some key trends to watch in the near future:

Regulators will demand more transparency and faster breach disclosures (this is already underway via the SEC, EU DORA, and other regulations that are amplifying the need for excellent TPRM system of record and reporting. )
Vendor accountability will increase, with more customers requiring real-time risk feeds and shared evidence portals
Risk scoring models will get smarter, blending AI insights with human evaluation.
Risk will become a shared responsibility, embedded across procurement, legal, engineering, and IT—not just owned by InfoSec

Organizations that modernize now—by automating workflows, integrating tools, and adopting scalable risk management frameworks—will be better prepared for what’s next.

Enterprise-Scale Risk, Compliance, and Cybersecurity Solutions in 2025