Event Driven Grc

Event-Driven GRC: Remediation at the Speed of Cloud

The biggest lie in cloud security is the “Daily Scan.”

Most organizations run their compliance tools (CSPMs) once every 24 hours. The tool scans the environment, finds a misconfiguration, and generates a PDF report.

Here is the problem: In the cloud, 24 hours is an eternity.

If a developer accidentally exposes a sensitive storage account to the public internet at 9:00 AM, and your scan doesn’t run until midnight, you have a 15-hour window of exposure. Attackers script their scans to find these buckets in minutes, not hours.

To fix this, we need to stop thinking in “cron jobs” and start thinking in “events.”

The Architecture of Auto-Remediation

In the GRC Engineering model, we treat a compliance violation as a software event, just like a user clicking a button or a server crashing.

In Azure, we build this pipeline using Azure Event Grid and Logic Apps.

The Workflow:

1. The Trigger: A user changes a storage account configuration (e.g., Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/write).
2. The Signal: Azure Event Grid detects this operation instantly.
3. The Brain: It fires a Serverless Function or Logic App.
4. The Fix: The Logic App checks the configuration. If “Public Access” is enabled, it flips the switch back to “Disabled” immediately.

The “Bot” vs. The “Ticket”

The old way of doing GRC was: Scan -> Alert -> Email Admin -> Wait 3 Days -> Admin Fixes it.

The new way is: Event -> Fix -> Notify Admin (“I fixed this for you”).

We move the Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR) from Days to Seconds.

Fear of the Auto-Fix

The most common objection I hear from Architects is: “But what if the bot breaks something critical?”

This is a valid fear. You don’t want an auto-remediation script shutting down a production database because it missed a tag.

The solution is Tag-Based Logic.

• If the resource is tagged Env: Production, send an alert to PagerDuty (Human intervention required).
• If the resource is tagged Env: Sandbox or Env: Dev, auto-remediate mercilessly.

This teaches developers that the “Dev” environment is safe to experiment in, but security controls are non-negotiable.

The Architect’s Takeaway

You cannot hire enough analysts to watch every console change in real-time. You have to automate the reaction.

When we move to Event-Driven GRC, we stop being the “hall monitors” who write tickets and start being the “immune system” that automatically heals the environment.