Continuous compliance monitoring – Make compliance your default

Treating compliance as a point-in-time and one-and-done activity makes organizations reactive towards audits.

Simply checking off compliance from a to-do list and closing the book leaves you vulnerable to a tangle of new risks emerging from both the rapidly changing cybersecurity landscape and as a consequence of growth. 

Compliance is a state that you’ve continuously got to work to maintain. This means you’ll have to account for new risks popping up at the asset-level, strengthen your overall posture to minimize organizational risks, and ensure continuous compliance monitoring.   

Continuous compliance monitoring helps navigate these risks by ensuring that assets are working as they should and providing visibility into your audit preparedness and security posture. This helps right-size your efforts and fast-track your journey to audit goals. 

The months leading up to compliance audits are stressful periods with a lot to be done, resulting in poor coordination and frenzied audit preparation. 

Without a consolidated view of all your assets, where the anomalies are and whether due process is followed, teams are left to put out fires and can only problem-solve issues in hindsight.  

The facts bear this out –  2 out of 3 CISOs say that they dislike their current tool set for audit preparations and declare that they have poor to no visibility into how well their audit prep is going. In effect, a lot of CISOs only get to know the quality of their audit prep from the auditors themselves! 

Reactive compliance puts you in the stands when you should be in the driver’s seat, resulting in disruptions, slow deal velocity, and undue stress on teams – ensuring continuous compliance monitoring is the antidote.

1. Audit stress

A reactive approach to compliance is fundamentally what causes audit stress. Preparing for audits largely involves equal parts record-keeping and asset consolidation. You’ve got to account for all your moving parts, and demonstrate that your people, assets, and processes are aligned with compliance guidelines. 

Doing either of these as a last-minute project puts enormous strain on your organization and is a recipe for missed deadlines, inaccurate evidence collection, and a burnt out team.   

2. Disruptions in day-to-day operations 

When you put off audit prep until the last minute compliance ends up overtaking other crucial business functions, resulting in avoidable disruptions. Gathering evidence, in particular, requires collaboration with several teams if done manually. 

This means that key stakeholders will have to juggle new priorities, adversely affecting your day-to-day operations resulting in even more fires to put out. 

3. Poor security posture 

Businesses play a zero-sum game when it comes to setting time-frames – all the time you spend doing one thing has to come from somewhere else. 

The longer you spend preparing for audits the more resources you take away from other areas. Security is among the hardest hit when you haven’t planned for audits. Without clear timelines and guarantees for compliance you undermine your own security posture, lose credibility, and slow down your deal velocity. 

Go from reactive to proactive with continuous compliance monitoring

One way to make the lead-up to audits less burdensome, error-prone and disruptive is to take compliances from stressfully reactive to consciously responsive and ensure continuous compliance monitoring. 

Organizations must make the switch from disparate and manual workflows to a structured and automated program that weaves compliance into day-to-day operations, instead of siloing it off as a point-in-time activity that results in poor compliance and concentrated, rushed audits.

By tracking compliance continuously, organizations can lift the operational burden of having to monitor controls and collect evidence right at the time of audit.

Moving focus to control management instead of audit management is key to streamlining compliance and audit prep. To accomplish this, you need a system that monitors controls centrally and automates testing to flag anomalies, sound remediation alerts to the right stakeholders, and continuously gather accurate and auditor-grade evidence. 

This way you ensure that you’re monitoring compliance continuously, hitting compliance benchmarks, and maintaining a solid posture all the way through audits and beyond.

Monitor compliance 24×7 with Sprinto

Sprinto’s continuous compliance monitoring brings visibility, efficiency, and accuracy to how you manage compliance by unifying assets, controls, and control management processes, including control testing and evidence collection.

Because Sprinto runs continuously, oversight is ensured and compliance drift successfully avoided. This way, Sprinto de-risks audits and upholds compliance with security standards to ensure continuous compliance monitoring.

How Sprinto ensures compliance:

1. Extract –  Sprinto helps operationalize compliance by extracting actionable tasks from compliance criteria and mapping these to controls, risks, assets, and policies. This way, compliance is made tangible and tasks clear. 
   

2. Integrate – Sprinto seamlessly integrates compliance tasks into day to day operations to ensure accountability around control management and upkeep. With Sprinto, compliance is embedded, not layered on.  
   
3. Automate  – Sprinto puts the wheels in motion and nudges your organization to compliance. By monitoring controls, alerting you to failed checks, and automatically logging audit evidence Sprinto ensures zero human intervention and last-minute surprises.
   
   

Connect the dots with powerful integrations

Sprinto’s powerful integrations and APIs connect all the infrastructure, code repos, devices, people, assets, and processes within your organization’s ecosystem to give you a unified view of everything that impacts compliance. 

With 200+ integrations, Sprinto builds an up-to-date inventory of assets, auto-maps controls, runs automated control checks, and auto-collects time-stamped, auditor-grade evidence on a dedicated dashboard. 

Consolidating all your moving parts in one place helps you account for new assets and risks on-the-go, course-correct when things go sour, and stay on track for audit goals.

Automate over 90% of compliance tasks

Sprinto helps infosec teams take a load off by continuously testing and validating controls, mapping their status against relevant framework criteria. In case of issues in control health, Sprinto’s automated alerts send context-rich notifications to assigned control owners pinpointing the issue’s location and severity. This helps enable time-bound remediation that adheres to SLAs and ensures continuous compliance monitoring.

Additionally, Sprinto automatically gathers evidence at your preferred frequency without disrupting day-to-day operations or affecting team productivity, enabling infosec teams to focus on work that pushes the needle, rather than house-keeping.

Get a 360-degree view of where you stand

Continuous compliance occurs organically on Sprinto’s centralized dashboard – switch between entity-level view and org-level view for a full picture of your controls and compliance progress. 

Assess controls as per pre-defined risk levels, assign owners for management, and manage all your compliance building blocks on a single consolidated dashboard, in real-time. As a result, stay on top of compliances and maintain audit readiness.

Maintain compliance in a changing ecosystem

Given how quickly fast-paced companies evolve and expand, the merits of high-frequency control testing become abundantly clear. 

Continuously monitoring controls for compliance empowers organizations not only to track tasks and progress made over time but also to cull out trends, right-size infosec effort, and introduce better control interventions to maintain compliance. 

In effect, continuous compliance monitoring nurtures a culture of perpetual improvement and security excellence, eschewing the notion of compliance as a one-off endeavor for a proactive approach. 

Get in touch with our compliance experts for a demo of how Sprinto ensures continuous compliance monitoring and sets you up for success in every future audit.