Unpopular opinion: For SMBs, a well-built SharePoint list beats GRC for cost.

I see a lot of SMBs getting sold on ServiceNow GRC when their actual process complexity doesn't justify the license cost or implementation overhead. Unless you're in a heavily regulated industry (think finance, major healthcare), you can get 80% of the way there with a disciplined setup in SharePoint Online—something you're already paying for.

The core GRC functions for an SMB often boil down to:
* A central register for risks, controls, and policies.
* Basic workflow for review cycles and approvals.
* Audit trails and simple reporting.
* Attaching evidence.

A SharePoint list with Power Automate can handle this. The key is structure and discipline, not the platform.

Here's a barebones example of a Risk Register list structure:

```xml
Title: Single line of text
Description: Multiple lines of text
Risk Owner: Person field
Inherent Rating: Choice (High, Medium, Low)
Current Rating: Choice (High, Medium, Low)
Status: Choice (Open, In Progress, Mitigated, Accepted)
Last Review Date: Date
Next Review Date: Date
Mitigation Plan: Multiple lines of text
Evidence Folder: Hyperlink
```

Pair this with:
1. A Power Automate flow that sends a monthly email to Risk Owners with items due for review.
2. Versioning enabled on the list to track changes.
3. A few Power BI visuals pinned to a dashboard for the leadership view.

Your breakpoint is when you need complex, automated integration with other systems for control testing or massive scale. For a team managing maybe 50-100 risks and controls, SharePoint is plenty. The moment you need to pull control status directly from your ITSM and ERP automatically, that's where a middleware platform or a proper GRC suite makes sense.

The real cost isn't the software—it's the internal process maturity. If you can't make it work in SharePoint, you probably won't magically succeed with a more complex tool. You'll just fail more expensively.