What is Cyber GRC? How Rapid7 is bringing compliance closer to security operations

Sabeen Malik is VP, Global Government Affairs and Public Policy at Rapid7. ⠀ Security teams need a better way to connect what they detect, what they fix, and what they can prove. The pace of modern security operations no longer works in defenders’ favor. IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025 found that the mean time to identify and contain a breach is now 241 days, even as AI and automation help defenders move faster. At the same time, Rapid7’s 2026 Global Threat Landscape Report shows how quickly attacker behavior is compressing the response window: exploited high and critical severity vulnerabilities more than doubled year over year, increasing 105% from 71 in 2024 to 146 in 2025, while the median time from publication to CISA KEV inclusion fell from 8.5 days to 5.0 days. This is not a future risk. It is today’s operational reality. It also exposes a governance problem most security programs were not built to solve. Security teams are expected to demonstrate, continuously, that controls are working, that risk is being reduced, and that security investments are delivering measurable outcomes. Point-in-time audit evidence, assembled quarterly, is structurally incompatible with an environment where the threat picture changes in minutes. The underlying issue is not a lack of effort, but a disconnect. Security data lives in one place, remediation happens in another, and evidence for auditors is assembled somewhere else. When leadership asks what changed, what was fixed, and what risk remains, teams are left stitching the story together manually producing reports that reflect where the organization was, not where it is. Cyber GRC closes that gap by bringing governance, risk management, and compliance closer to the security data and workflows teams already rely on. Why security operations and compliance need connected data For years, security operations and GRC have run in parallel. One team manages threats, exposures, and remediation. Another manages policies, controls, audits, and evidence. Both aim to reduce risk, but typically without shared context or shared data. That separation is no longer sustainable. Vulnerability exploitation rose 34% year-over-year and now accounts for 20% of all breaches, with a median of zero days between critical vulnerability publication and mass exploitation (Verizon DBIR 2025). Supply chain breaches doubled, now representing 30% of all incidents. Ransomware appeared in 44% of breaches – up 37% from the prior year. Security leaders operating in this environment face an expectation that compliance teams were not designed to meet alone: continuous proof that controls are effective against adversaries who operate at machine speed. When AI agents can autonomously chain every phase of an attack with minimal human oversight, a quarterly audit cycle is not an assurance, but a historical record. Why Cyber GRC matters now Boards are no longer satisfied with compliance status reports. They want dollarized risk scenarios and e