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Accelerating risk maturity: A unified framework from PwC & OneTrust
Implementing and following a blueprint helps organizations stay resilient in the face of constant threats
Kaitlyn Archibald
Product Marketing Director
September 22, 2025
From academic methodologies to technical scoping, managing risk can feel like an overwhelming obligation for your business. Once harnessed, the insights gained quickly serve as a strategic advantage. But in-between, risk and compliance resources can quickly get caught up in reactive cycles rather than proactively building resilient integrated systems to stay ahead of uncertainty.
So, what does mapping out a scalable process look like?
A crawl, walk, run journey
Building an integrated risk management (IRM) process can start as a vision. Deciding where to begin is often a challenge in itself, particularly as businesses continue to evolve at a rapid pace and are looking to create a foundational approach to resilience.
There are core issues organizations are facing: is there risk ownership alignment with other leaders who may be prioritizing their own innovation? Can existing risk management processes and tooling help communicate critical information to the executive and board levels to keep the program moving forward? Without these answers, a widening gap between awareness, action, and exposure presents itself.
Crawl: Building visibility and consistency
The starting point is often messy. Risk data is scattered across spreadsheets, reporting is backward-looking, and each department defines risk differently. In this stage, success often comes from consolidation and standardization:
- Refine the foundational data taxonomies and risk classifications to enable consistency and scalability
- Centralize risk and compliance data into a single, governed source of truth
- Establish a crosswalk of controls, frameworks, and scoring methodologies
- Automated repeatable and high-effort processes, such as evidence collection and reporting to free up resources for higher-value activities
- Set governance structures and ownership models to drive accountability and support the future roadmap
Even these foundational moves can deliver immediate value. For example, PwC and OneTrust clients have achieved significant time and cost savings — equivalent to an $84K reduction per FTE in cost for time and resources annually.
Walk: Connecting risk across the enterprise
Once the foundation is in place, organizations will typically focus on integrating deep within a domain to confirm controls are implemented by-design for their existing systems and stakeholders - the next step is to connect the dots across silos. This is where IRM starts to reshape how organizations can operate:
- Linking IT, compliance, audit, privacy, and third-party risk in a connected ecosystem
- Embedding automated workflows so that risk responses are consistent and timely
- Leveraging dashboards and analytics to surface cross-functional insights
At this level, many organizations begin to see risk management not as overhead, but as intelligence. With the proper tooling, it becomes possible to monitor vendor risks in real-time, map controls across more than 55 frameworks, and integrate with 200 enterprise systems. The result comes in the form of deeper insights and earlier signals to act on emerging threats.
Run: Embedding resilience as a strategic asset
Now, risk management can become a proactive enabler of strategy. Your organization isn’t just responding to risk, it’s anticipating it, modeling scenarios, and embedding resilience into growth plans. Signs of this maturity level can include:
- Predictive and prescriptive insights using advanced analytics
- Continuous monitoring across global operations, third parties, and digital assets
- Integrating risk into decision-making on strategy, capital allocation, and transformation initiatives
Top-performing organizations don’t just monitor threats, they operationalize resilience. That’s why PwC and OneTrust emphasize resilience by design.
Putting IRM into action
Many risk leaders understand the need for IRM, but the challenge lives between intent and execution. PwC and OneTrust bring together the platform, methodology, and services to accelerate IRM maturity:
- Unified platform: OneTrust provides solutions across IT risk, third-party risk, policy governance, and incident management, creating a truly connected risk ecosystem.
- Scalable methodology: PwC can help organizations adopt a maturity model, aligning IRM with strategy, operations, and regulatory requirements.
- Operational expertise: Going beyond implementation, customers embed governance, define metrics, and sustain long-term resilience.
This can yields faster time to value, reduced audit and compliance complexity, and a future-proof IRM program that scales with your business.
Turning risk into opportunity
Risk isn’t going away. But organizations that often thrive are the ones that see risk differently: not as a burden, but as an opportunity to build trust, agility, and resilience.
By following a practical three-step blueprint you can move beyond reactive oversight and toward risk management that drives real business value.
Find out more with this infographic, jointly created by PwC and OneTrust.
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