Are you struggling to keep up with expanding control requirements and new regulations? It's time to shift from reactive audits to a continuous testing approach, powered by technology. This guide offers seven foundational tips to help you establish a scalable program. Learn how to leverage automation for efficient testing, streamlined evidence collection, and greater assurance coverage — and get metrics to measure your program’s success.
In a fast-evolving risk and regulatory landscape, compliance programs must be able to respond to new requirements with agility. Yet, despite teams being asked to do more with less every day, many are insufficiently prepared and aligned — leading to significant delays and redundant efforts.
Compliance programs are often developed with an initial objective in mind, such as complying with an industry standard or achieving a particular security certification. However, remaining compliant in periods of change is not easy; the expansion of business operations, systems, and locations often increases the scope of risk and control requirements. No matter how well-conceived your program is, ignoring the impact of changes will hinder its growth and scalability over time.
Instead of viewing compliance in terms of that initial goal, consider what is needed to support your internal control processes from a long-term investment perspective. A continuous approach to control testing — anchored in a common control set and automated control tests on a regular cadence — can help alleviate resource constraints and enable you to focus on emerging areas and improvements.
Enlisting the aid of AI, automation, and other advanced technologies is critical to helping modern compliance teams keep pace with today’s expanding control environments. Simultaneously, technology solutions that support continuous control testing have advanced to meet the growing market need for them.
Evidence has shown that forward-thinking compliance teams embrace technologies that help them automate repetitive, manual tasks, including common control tests such as user access reviews, new user access testing, and terminated user access testing; evidence collection; and data cleansing and manipulation. By automating common cyber control tests, IT compliance teams can enhance their organization’s risk posture with minimal resource strain, supporting their efforts to keep pace with rapidly expanding control environments.
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