A large enterprise software company had built its compliance program on a platform powerful enough to do almost anything, and that was exactly the problem. Managing controls, evidence, and risk across multiple frameworks had become a full-time administrative burden, with critical work still happening in spreadsheets alongside the system it was supposed to replace. With the incumbent contract approaching expiration and a ten-person GRC team stretched thin, the company needed a platform its people could actually run, not one that required constant configuration just to stay current.
[ The Problem ]
A compliance program held together with spreadsheets and institutional memory
The GRC environment had grown fragmented over time. The incumbent platform remained in place, but manual control management was still happening in spreadsheets, and cross-framework evidence collection required coordination effort that did not scale. Risk and control mapping across SOC 2, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, and NIST consumed team capacity that should have been directed at audit readiness.
Leadership needed visible progress and better oversight. The security team needed a system more members could actually use without deep platform expertise. The cost of staying was no longer lower than the cost of changing, and the contract deadline made that calculation unavoidable.
[ What they needed ]
The team needed to accomplish several things at once, under a hard deadline:
- Replace the incumbent GRC platform before contract expiration without disrupting active compliance programs
- Centralize control monitoring across SOC 2, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, and NIST into a unified framework
- Automate evidence collection to reduce manual overhead across the security team
- Establish integration coverage across cloud, identity, and engineering tooling already in use
- Give non-specialist team members the ability to own controls and evidence without heavy configuration
- Provide leadership with real-time visibility into compliance posture and risk status
- Define a phased implementation sequence that could deliver value before the incumbent shut down
[ Why Drata won ]
Selected over ServiceNow, Drata won by solving the operational burden the incumbent had created, not by matching it feature for feature.
Usability over capability breadth: the security team explicitly contrasted Drata's UI and self-service administration with ServiceNow's complexity. The decisive question was not which platform could do more in theory, but which one the team could actually run without constant configuration overhead.
Automation replaced the manual layer: evidence collection, control monitoring, and cross-framework mapping had all been partially offloaded to spreadsheets under the incumbent. Drata's integration coverage and automated workflows addressed the specific manual burden that had motivated the search.
Existing trust lowered organizational friction: a prior Trust Center relationship meant Drata was not evaluated as a new vendor from a standing start. That history accelerated internal confidence and reduced the organizational risk typically associated with replacing a core compliance platform.
Phased implementation matched the buyer's real constraint: the team needed a credible cutover path before the incumbent expired, not a perfect future-state risk automation model. Drata's implementation sequencing addressed that constraint directly, making the transition feel achievable rather than aspirational.
[ How Drata solved it ]
Drata's Unified Control Framework gave the team a single operating layer across all four active compliance programs, eliminating the cross-framework mapping effort that had been consuming analyst time. Automated evidence collection through validated integrations with Microsoft 365, Entra, Intune, and AWS replaced the manual collection cycles that had kept the team in spreadsheets.
The platform's self-service configurability was a direct contrast to the incumbent. Team members who had been locked out of meaningful GRC work by administrative complexity could now own controls, track evidence, and manage remediation without specialist support. Drata's implementation team worked with the buyer to design a phased onboarding sequence that prioritized the unified control framework first, giving the organization a credible cutover path before the incumbent contract expired.
An existing Trust Center relationship also reduced the organizational friction typically associated with a new enterprise vendor, allowing the team to treat the expansion as program evolution rather than a full vendor change.
[ Before and after Drata ]
Before Drata, a ten-person GRC team was absorbing manual overhead across four compliance frameworks, with critical work still running through spreadsheets alongside a platform too complex to administer at scale.
After, control monitoring and evidence collection are automated and centralized, the team operates without the administrative bottleneck, and the compliance program survived a full platform cutover without disrupting active audits.
[ Business outcome ]
The company exited a GRC environment that required constant manual intervention and entered one its team could administer independently. Control monitoring, evidence collection, and cross-framework compliance operations are now centralized in a single platform, with automation handling the collection cycles that previously required direct analyst effort.
The cutover completed before the incumbent contract expired, preserving continuity across all four active compliance programs. Leadership gained the visibility into compliance posture they had been missing, and the security team recovered capacity that had been absorbed by administrative overhead. The foundation is now in place to extend into deeper risk automation as the program matures, without rebuilding the operating model to get there.