No GRC team plans to end up with fragmented tools for managing compliance. It just happens.
Your compliance team might start with a single compliance software platform to manage your current validation requirements. A few months later, your IT department introduces a data warehouse that requires unique compliance processes, so you add a second tool to cover the new requirements. Later, when your risk management team rolls out AI workflows and cloud data, you adopt another compliance platform to handle the separate controls and reporting needs.
If each new tool operates separately, you end up with compliance silos. According to a 2025 Clarity Factory survey, 77% of Chief Security Officers say data silos are the primary barrier to GRC teams maximizing their impact. But beyond making compliance harder to manage, fragmented compliance tools have hidden expenses that can drain your budget. Here’s how the cost of compliance silos can add up.
Key Takeaways
- Fragmented compliance tools lead to silos, causing increased complexity and inefficiencies in compliance processes.
- Duplicated work, such as evidence requests and control mapping, wastes team time and resources.
- Data fragmentation increases compliance risks by obscuring visibility of requirements and control coverage.
- Integrating disparate compliance systems reduces costs and improves efficiency, enabling faster audit cycles and better document management.
- A unified compliance approach enhances overall agility, allowing teams to respond more effectively to compliance changes and challenges.
Table of Contents
Duplicate Work
Compliance complexity is growing. According to a 2025 PwC survey, 85% of leaders say compliance has increased since 2022. Tool fragmentation makes compliance even more complex because it forces your team to duplicate several compliance tasks.
Evidence Requests
Evidence collection is already a significant time commitment for GRC teams. According to Onspring’s 2026 GRC Benchmarking Report, 25.9% of GRC professionals identify evidence collection and documentation as their most time-consuming activities. Data silos add to that burden by making evidence requests redundant.
For example, your team can ask a control owner to provide a list of active users on Tuesday for a SOC 2 audit and then ask for the same list on Thursday for an ISO 27001 assessment. Instead of collecting evidence once and reusing it across frameworks, your team wastes time tracking down information that already exists. And because evidence requests are a standard part of audit and compliance work, this duplication can quickly become a recurring drain on team time.
Control Mapping
Different frameworks often address similar risks through differently worded requirements. For instance, top practices in managing GRC for ISO 27001 and SOC 2 involve access control and change management. When each framework lives in a different tool, your GRC team can create and maintain separate control mappings instead of mapping requirements to a shared control. Without a shared view, your team spends additional time comparing requirements and creating mappings, instead of maintaining them as frameworks change.
Redundant Documentation
Fragmented systems can also force your team to maintain separate versions of:
- Policies
- Procedures
- Audit reports
- Control descriptions
- Supporting documentation
Without centralized data governance, if you make a change in one system, your team may need to manually reflect it across several others. This redundancy creates more maintenance work and increases the chances of inconsistencies.
Wasted Employee Time
As well as duplicating tasks, a lack of centralized data governance delays routine work. In many GRC departments, information is scattered, which unsurprisingly makes it hard for teams to find needed data. In fact, employees say difficulty finding relevant information is the top barrier to moving fast. Fifty-six percent say the only way to get the data they need is to ask a team member or to schedule a meeting, resulting in executives and employees spending 25% of their workweek searching for information.
Beyond spending so many work hours hunting for information, teams also waste time with manual data reconciliation across disconnected systems. GRC professionals spend hours comparing records across fragmented tools to identify missing or conflicting information. They also have to piece together the information they need.
Slower Audit Cycles
Fragmented tools can also slow your audit cycle because the information auditors need is spread across different systems. Evidence collection takes longer when teams search across disconnected systems to locate and validate records. And when frameworks have overlapping requirements, your team may repeat the same preparation work for each audit.
The problem continues after the audit. When findings and remediation tasks span multiple systems, your team has to track ownership, updates, and deadlines, making it harder to close issues quickly.
Increased Compliance Risk
Apart from making compliance more expensive, data fragmentation is a compliance risk. When your compliance data is spread across tools, your team can’t easily see which requirements are covered or unaddressed.
This lack of visibility can lead to the assumption that someone else has covered a compliance gap. Your team may overlook an uncovered requirement or assume control in a system that another team manages.
And while the average cost of a data breach is $4.99 million, according to IBM’s 2026 report, the breaches stemming from non-compliance with regulations cost roughly $174,000 more. Even if fragmented tools don’t directly cause a breach, gaps in visibility make it harder to identify and address risks before they become costly incidents.
Extra Software Licenses
Perhaps the most direct financial cost of data silos in compliance is the use of overlapping software tools. As different teams adopt different tools for distinct compliance needs, your organization can end up paying for multiple platforms that perform similar functions.
If you want to connect different compliance tools, you have to spend additional time and resources on integrations. You may spend on:
- Extra licenses for integration tools
- Ongoing maintenance for integration
- Employee time needed to keep those tools working together
- Custom development to build connections between systems that weren’t designed to talk to each other
Why More Tools or AI Isn’t the Right Fix
As generative AI and other artificial intelligence tools become increasingly common in compliance workflows, it’s easy to assume that adding more tools will solve tool fragmentation. However, technology alone cannot address the underlying data fragmentation. After all, 71% of GRC teams believe AI has a net positive impact on compliance, while 82% use AI tools for workflow automation.
But no AI feature or security solution can compensate for a fragmented data foundation. In fact, removing data silos is the key to unlocking real AI value.
According to Deloitte’s 2024 survey, despite increased investment and early enthusiasm, data and risk remain among the biggest challenges to scaling generative AI. As a result, 55% of organizations initially avoid certain generative AI use cases because of data deficiencies. And industry research suggests they have good reason to be cautious. Eighty-seven percent of teams implementing digital initiatives report poor data quality as a barrier to achieving value, according to PwC’s 2026 report.
When data is spread across different systems or departments, it’s almost impossible to create the comprehensive view that AI applications need to function effectively. Without that unified view, AI-related compliance initiatives can falter, and it’s harder to trust models to make informed decisions and deliver value.
Reduce Waste With Unified Compliance
The business value of connected compliance extends far beyond software savings. The measurable business value includes efficiency gains from fewer duplicate requests, faster audit cycles, reduced manual work, and fewer compliance risks. However, the true long-term business value of unified compliance is agility.
As compliance complexity and change accelerate, the ability to see the full compliance picture instantly lets your team keep pace. At Onspring, we’ll help you break silos with unified GRC software. Our platform connects disparate compliance systems so all your compliance information is accessible across the workflow automation processes.
With Onspring, you can:
- Centralize controls
- Automate compliance workflows
- Monitor compliance with real-time dashboards
- Collect and map evidence across audits
- Manage policies from creation through attestation
- Generate automated compliance reports
Instead of chasing down compliance data across systems, your compliance and risk professionals can access the information they need in one place and reuse evidence across audits. Your GRC team will lose less time to managing compliance administration, saving their time and budget for more important concerns.
Learn how unifying compliance reduces waste in our Mapping Multiple Frameworks into a Unified Compliance Program ebook.
