Strategic CISOs | Podcast Series by TrustCloud®

Upgrade GRC into a Profit Center and Business Enabler

A candid, practical session for CISOs and security leaders who need to map security to business priorities and show the ROI of their programs.

Featuring

Dave Brown

CISO and CIO, Andesite and Author of The Lean CISO

Sravish Sridhar

CEO, TrustCloud

(Host)

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How do you turn GRC from a cost center into a profit center?

You turn GRC into a profit center by treating it as three measurable outcomes at once: rising revenue, flat or falling cost, and reduced financial risk — then reporting all three the way any other business function reports results.

That’s the definition Dave Brown, CISO and CIO of Andesite, uses throughout this session with TrustCloud CEO Sravish Sridhar. Dave built Andesite’s security and compliance program — what he calls “Compliance High” — from the ground up, aligning it to FedRAMP High, SOC 2 Type II, HITRUST, three ISO standards, and CSA STAR Level 2, so the company could sell into federal, financial services, healthcare, and international markets from day one.

The session’s real value is in the specifics: a four-lens framework for evaluating whether a program is actually working, a worked ROI example tying a $150K compliance investment to a $3M sales pipeline, and how Andesite’s trust center cuts vendor-questionnaire turnaround from weeks to days.

Grow

Revenue contribution

Protect

Board & liability risk

Optimize

Cost & efficiency

Engage

Team & culture health

FROM THE SESSION

Key Takeaways

Here are the top highlights on how you can make GRC a business enabler and a profit center.

A profit center is just three numbers moving the right way.

Revenue up, cost flat or falling, overall risk down. If all three are true, the program is functioning as a profit center.

The first 90 days are about learning the business, not building the program.

Spend that window mapping cyber objectives to business objectives — so the business sees security as part of itself, not overhead.

A real ROI model looks like this: $150K in, $1.5M validated.

Dave’s own example: roughly $150,000 invested in compliance priorities against a $3M pipeline, with $1.5M closed — a return the CFO can evaluate like any other investment.

The trust center turns weeks of vendor review into days.

Pre-answered evidence and self-serve access have cut typical questionnaire turnaround from three to four weeks down to three to four days.

Tracking what customers download tells you where to stop investing.

If a policy document nobody opens, that’s a signal to stop spending time maintaining it — a low-effort way to cut wasted compliance work.

Automation moved evidence collection from minutes to seconds.

What used to take ~50 minutes to collect and 15 to analyze per control now happens in seconds with API-based automation.

Culture change starts with explaining “why,” not just “what.”

Training that demystifies the reasoning behind a policy gets far more buy-in than training that just states the rule.

Cyber deserves its own board seat, not a shared one.

Folding cyber into the audit committee means it competes with financial review — and usually only gets real attention after a breach.

SESSION AGENDA

What We Covered

How to align your security program strategy to business objectives

How to identify the right partners and resources to execute well

How to track and communicate milestones, mapped to business objectives

Shared practical tips to drive adoption and build an enterprise-wide security culture

GO DEEPER

Companion Reading

5 Ways CISOs Can Turn GRC Into a Profit Center, Not a Cost Center

TrustCloud’s written recap of this same conversation — organized around five themes, including treating trust as a KPI, automating the audit loop, and using AI to prioritize risk, plus its own separate audience Q&A on trust-to-close metrics.

SESSION CUTS

Highlights from the session

Speakers

Dave Brown

CISO and CIO, Andesite and Author of The Lean CISO

Dave spent 21 years in the U.S. Coast Guard, including leading a Computer Incident Response Team, before roles at the Department of Homeland Security and eight years as CISO at a company later acquired for $1.2 billion. He’s now CISO and CIO at Andesite, where he built the security, compliance, and IT program from the ground up, and has taught as an adjunct professor for six years.

Sravish Sridhar

CEO, TrustCloud

Sravish is the founder and CEO of TrustCloud, a security assurance platform built to help CISOs at mid-market and enterprise companies reimagine GRC as a continuous, AI-driven function. He hosts the Strategic CISOs series to bring practitioner frameworks directly to security leaders.

WHO THIS IS FOR

Built for security leaders proving business value

CISOs, Deputy CISOs, and Heads of GRC or Security Assurance looking for a repeatable way to connect their program to business outcomes

Security leaders who need to strengthen board reporting, shorten sales cycles, or support expansion into new markets or verticals

Anyone building or rebuilding a security program in their first 90 days in a role

FAQ

Questions CISOs ask about this session

How do you measure whether a trust center is actually helping close deals?

Track document downloads and questionnaire turnaround time by customer. Andesite ties its trust center to its CRM so each prospect’s activity maps back to pipeline stage and revenue, and questionnaire response time has dropped from three to four weeks down to three to four days.

Can a trust center let customers skip the security questionnaire entirely?

Not entirely, but it substantially reduces the burden — pre-answered evidence means a full questionnaire response can take hours instead of days, and some prospects request less because the trust center already shows continuously tested evidence.

How do you decide which compliance frameworks to prioritize first?

Prioritize based on the markets you’re actually trying to sell into — Andesite targets FedRAMP High, SOC 2, PCI, HITRUST, and ISO standards specifically because it sells into federal, financial services, healthcare, and international markets.

How should CISOs prepare for regulations that haven't fully landed yet, like the EU AI Act or CRA?

Start with the regulations you’re already subject to — GDPR and CCPA are the baseline, since operating with EU or California customers creates exposure regardless of where the company is based — then add dedicated regulatory-tracking tooling as new frameworks emerge.

Should cyber risk be reported through the audit committee?

Dave argues no — cyber and technology risk deserve a dedicated board-level conversation separate from the audit committee’s financial review, otherwise it tends to get real attention only after a breach occurs.