The way organizations manage risk has undergone a fundamental change. The static, siloed approaches of the past are no longer sufficient to navigate today’s dynamic threat landscape. As business processes become increasingly interconnected and the pace of change accelerates, the tools used to manage governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) must evolve accordingly.
For years, Archer has been a prominent name in the GRC space, largely due to its established industry expertise, strong alliances with respected consulting partners, and its historical role in introducing initial concepts as the GRC world evolved. However, as organizations look to build more agile and resilient programs, many are exploring alternatives that better fit the needs of a modern enterprise. So, let’s examine the criteria for evaluating GRC platforms today and see why choosing a modern alternative, like LogicGate Risk Cloud, might be the most strategic decision your business ever makes.
Understanding GRC Tools
Before diving into any new technology, it’s essential to establish a clear understanding of the GRC landscape. The term “GRC” is broad, but its components and the software that powers them are critical for building a resilient, forward-thinking organization.
What is GRC?
Governance, Risk, and Compliance is not a department or a software solution. It’s the integrated collection of capabilities that enable an organization to reliably achieve its objectives, address uncertainty, and act with integrity.
- Governance: The rules, processes, and structures through which an organization is directed and controlled.
- Risk: The effect of uncertainty on objectives. This includes everything from cyber risk and financial risk to operational and strategic risks.
- Compliance: The act of adhering to stated requirements, whether they come from external standards (NIST, ISO 27001, HIPAA) or internal policies.
What Is GRC Software?
GRC software is the technology that operationalizes a company’s GRC strategy. It’s the engine that moves teams away from spreadsheets, email chains, and other forms of manual effort toward a centralized, automated, and proactive data-driven approach. Its primary role is to provide a single source of truth for all risk and compliance activities. This is critical because GRC is not the responsibility of a single department and requires input and action from stakeholders across the entire enterprise.
A GRC platform provides a common language and centralized hub for diverse teams to collaborate effectively, encompassing information security, internal audit, legal, finance, and executive leadership.
The benefits of implementing a GRC platform are tangible and far-reaching:
- It standardizes and automates workflows for tasks such as risk assessments, control testing, and policy exceptions, ensuring consistency and reducing the likelihood of human error.
- By centralizing risk and compliance data, a GRC platform provides leaders with accurate, real-time insights, allowing them to make more informed strategic decisions.
- It creates a secure, auditable system of record for all GRC activities, from evidence collection to remediation tracking. This has critical, real-world implications in highly regulated industries like healthcare and finance, where data protection and demonstrating due diligence are especially important.
Why Do You Need a GRC Platform?
To put it frankly, managing risk and compliance with manual processes is no longer viable. GRC platforms directly impact an organization’s ability to meet its goals and thrive in the digital future. First, GRC platforms can automate tedious tasks like assessment scoping, evidence collection, and remediation assignments. These capabilities free up your team to focus on strategic mitigation and program maturation.
Beyond that, GRC platforms can create a connected view of risk. A robust platform ensures that a vulnerability identified by the IT security team is automatically linked to the relevant controls and business processes, for example. This interconnected ecosystem provides a holistic understanding of potential impact and fosters more robust mitigation.
With access to all relevant data in one place, GRC platforms can provide leadership with real-time dashboards and metrics. Instead of relying on outdated quarterly reports, GRC platforms can provide a clear view of the organization’s risk posture at any time.
Understanding the Role of Archer in GRC
Introduction to Archer Technologies
Archer Integrated Risk Management (formerly RSA Archer) has long been a foundational player in the GRC market, establishing itself as a comprehensive solution for organizations of all sizes. For many organizations, it was the first major step in moving away from manual processes toward a more structured approach to risk.
Originally part of Dell and later acquired by RSA as Archer Technologies, Archer Integrated Risk Management has undergone several ownership changes. What was once a standalone company backed by Symphony Technology Group (STG), Archer is now owned by Cinven, an international private equity firm. This history has created a vast ecosystem of providers, consultants, and implementation partners necessary to maintain the platform. Its end users are typically seasoned GRC professionals, IT risk management teams, and internal audit departments within highly regulated industries.
The Archer IRM software, known as the Archer Integrated Risk Management Platform, has several modules covering GRC functionalities, including:
- Tools for identifying, assessing, and monitoring enterprise and operational risks.
- Content and workflows for managing adherence to various regulatory standards.
- Centralizing the creation, approval, and distribution of corporate policies.
- Supporting the planning, execution, and tracking of internal audits.
However, as a legacy software solution, it was built on a highly technically coded foundation that can present challenges for modern businesses. The key question for leaders today is not whether Archer is a comprehensive GRC platform, but whether its approach aligns with the speed and agility required to manage risk effectively in today’s environment.
Evaluating the Best GRC Tools Available
Choosing a GRC platform in today’s market requires a new set of evaluation criteria. While a wide range of features is important, a more strategic lens reveals what truly separates legacy tools from modern solutions. The best GRC tool should be evaluated on its ability to adapt and grow with your business, not solely on features needed to support the business today.
Criteria for the Best GRC Tool
When comparing GRC software, four core pillars stand out:
| Scalability, User Experience, and Pricing | Automation and Decision-Making Support | Scope and Depth of Workflows | Customer Support and Success |
| A modern GRC platform must be able to scale efficiently as your business grows. Combined with technical capacity, it must foster a positive user experience that encourages adoption across the business. These requirements alongside a transparent pricing model ensure hidden costs related to administration and consulting are accounted for. | The best GRC software does more than just store data; it actively supports better decision-making. Through powerful automation, it can handle routine tasks that free up GRC professionals to focus on strategic analysis. The platform should deliver insights through dashboards and reports that help leadership understand risk and make informed choices. | Legacy systems often require specialized developers and weeks or months to change a process. A modern, no-code or low-code platform empowers GRC teams to configure and adapt their own workflows in hours or days, enabling the organization to respond to new risks and regulations at the speed of business. | Best in class customer support and success is a crucial differentiator to consider when selecting a GRC tool. Optimal support teams encompass dedicated customer success managers for all accounts at no additional cost, optional technical account managers to aid in strategic planning, and expedited support response times. |
The Downside of Legacy Technology
Legacy platforms often carry significant technical debt. This can manifest as a clunky user experience, long implementation cycles, and a rigid architecture that makes changes difficult and costly. Our analysis of 30 recent engagements involving Archer customers revealed that the most common reasons customers choose to leave are directly tied to these legacy pain points.
- High Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): The subscription fee is just the beginning. The hidden costs of dedicated administrators, external consulting fees for simple changes, and extensive training requirements create a significant financial burden.
- Administrative Overhead: GRC teams often spend more time maintaining the platform than using it for strategic work. In our discovery conversations, former Archer users consistently report spending 10-15 hours per week on manual tasks like reporting and user management. In-house or outsourced Archer admins are a full-time position with Archer customers.
- Lack of Agility: When a new risk or regulation emerges, Archer can take weeks or months to adapt. Additionally, it typically does not provide automatic updates to customers, as they are required to have an outside content provider if not a customer of Compliance.AI. This lack of flexibility puts the business at a strategic disadvantage.
On the other end of the spectrum are point solutions that are excellent at one thing, like vulnerability management or evidence collection, but fail to provide a holistic view of risk. This approach creates dangerous silos that prevent leaders from understanding how a cyber risk, for example, impacts their compliance with ISO 27001 or their overall enterprise risk posture.
Analyzing Archer GRC Pricing
Archer has a complex pricing structure that can make it challenging to accurately predict the total cost over time. The initial decision between a cloud-based vs. on-premises deployment sets the foundation for cost, but the complexity multiplies from there. Numerous factors, including employee count, influence the cost of Archer.
For platforms like Archer, accurate budgeting becomes a significant challenge. A simple cost-benefit analysis of the license fee is insufficient because the initial quote rarely reflects the final cost. To truly compare GRC platforms, organizations must calculate the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), which accounts for the hidden costs that cause budget overruns. These include the salaries of dedicated platform administrators, annual maintenance fees, and the unpredictable cost of external consultants required for platform upgrades and changes. Our analysis shows that these hidden costs can make the TCO of Archer up to 40% higher than Risk Cloud.
Highlighting LogicGate and Other Competitors
While Archer represents the largest relic in the industry, the modern GRC landscape is populated by a range of legacy providers, including IBM OpenPages, OneTrust, and ZenGRC. In contrast, LogicGate’s Risk Cloud platform is uniquely positioned to address the core challenges of both legacy complexity and point solution silos.
Risk Cloud’s role in a comprehensive GRC process is to act as a flexible, central hub that connects risk and compliance data across the enterprise. It is a modern SaaS platform designed with a user-friendly interface at its core. This focus on usability is a key differentiator, directly addressing the administrative overhead that plagues legacy systems.
Beyond that, Risk Cloud users can create and adapt sophisticated, configurable workflows without writing a single line of code. This dramatically accelerates time-to-value and allows organizations to respond to new risks and regulations with unprecedented speed.
Further, Risk Cloud breaks down silos between different GRC functions. For example, its incident management capabilities are not siloed off in a separate platform but are intrinsically linked to your controls, policies, and risk registers. This holistic approach provides a complete, contextualized view of any event.
Why Choose Alternatives to RSA IRM?
Deciding to move away from a long-standing platform like Archer is a strategic one. But it’s not just about swapping one technology for another. Leaving Archer is fundamentally upgrading your organization’s ability to manage risk.
Advantages of Leaving Archer
Organizations that migrate from Archer consistently realize three primary benefits:
- Enhanced security through agility
- Significant cost savings through automation.
- A true partnership
In today’s dynamic threat landscape, speed is a critical security advantage. Legacy platforms that require weeks or months to update content in response to a new threat leave your organization exposed. A modern, flexible platform allows your information security team to adapt in near real-time. This agility means your GRC initiatives are no longer a static library but a living, responsive part of your defense strategy.
The most immediate advantage of leaving Archer is the financial relief from shedding its high total cost of ownership. Our analysis shows that the hidden costs of dedicated administrators and external consulting fees can inflate Archer’s TCO by up to 40% over Risk Cloud. By embracing automated workflows, a no-code interface, platform-wide AI capabilities, and dynamic risk reports, teams reclaim 10-15 hours per analyst each week, shifting expensive human capital from platform maintenance to strategic mitigation.
Lastly, the most vital advantage of choosing the right modern GRC provider is gaining a genuine partner dedicated to your success, not just providing transactional support. Unlike legacy providers, a true partner offers you direct access to dedicated GRC experts who are committed to your program’s success. They guide you through complex risks, keep you updated on platform improvements, and help you grow your GRC program into a strategic advantage.
The Advantages of Using LogicGate Risk Cloud
Organizations that migrate from Archer to LogicGate Risk Cloud gain value across the three primary benefits.
Enhanced Security Through Agility: LogicGate’s Risk Cloud offers enhanced security and agility by combining a flexible, no-code architecture with proactive automation. Its scalable design allows programs to grow without extensive service engagements, adapting to evolving IT risk management and governance needs. Furthermore, it transforms security from reactive to proactive, automating vulnerability ingestion, impact assessment, and remediation, ensuring timely and auditable mitigation.
Cost savings through automation: Based on data from 39 LogicGate customers who actively quantify program performance using the Value Realization tool, the average LogicGate Risk Cloud user saves $50,000 annually through automations alone. Spark AI goes one step further to fast track your GRC program by instantly generating remediation plans, identify critical data linkages across dynamic risk and compliance landscapes, and autofilling forms. A True Partnership: LogicGate’s simple, no-code UI and guided onboarding, including free online courses and live support, reduce the learning curve for new users (LogicGate Academy). LogicGate earns high marks for its customer support and success, with CSMs included for all customers, and dedicated technical account manager offerings. LogicGate reviews indicate fast response times that receive high satisfaction scores (4.8/5 on Capterra) (Capterra Reviews).
Conclusion: Making an Informed Decision
The choice between a legacy platform like Archer and a modern alternative like Risk Cloud is more than a software evaluation; it’s a strategic decision about the future of your risk program. Making the right choice requires a clear comparison of the platforms’ core philosophies and a thoughtful prioritization of your organization’s unique needs.
Prioritizing Your Needs in a Dynamic GRC Ecosystem
Ultimately, the best GRC tool is the one that aligns with your organization’s specific goals and operational realities. As you make your decision, consider the following factors:
- Aligning with Organizational Needs: Be honest about your goals. Are you simply trying to check a box for a specific compliance framework, or are you aiming to build a truly resilient, forward-thinking risk program? Your answer will guide you toward either a static, legacy tool or a flexible, modern platform.
- Considering Your Stakeholders: The most feature-rich platform is useless if no one uses it. Look beyond the needs of the core GRC team and consider your business stakeholders. Will they adopt the tool willingly? Does it make their lives easier? A platform with a high-quality user experience is essential for driving the enterprise-wide adoption needed for a successful program.
- Choosing the Right Provider: Select a provider that understands your industry and can serve as a strategic partner. Your chosen risk management solution should not only fit your immediate operational risk needs but also demonstrate a clear roadmap for innovation that aligns with your future initiatives, whether that’s expanding your third-party risk management program or building out new ESG capabilities.
The best way to understand the difference between Archer and Risk Cloud is to see it for yourself. If you’re ready to leave fragmented workflows and hidden costs behind, contact us today to schedule a personalized demo of Risk Cloud. We’ll show you exactly how our no-code platform can help you build a more connected, efficient, and resilient risk program in hours, not months.
