Grace Arundhati
Compliance management is increasingly challenging due to regulations like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR. Managing audits, policies, vendor assessments, and risk can overwhelm IT, security, compliance, and risk teams.
Automated compliance checks, like CAT, simplify this by running daily checks on compliance artifacts, flagging “passing” or “failing” items.
Automated controls testing helps teams stay audit-ready, reduce manual effort, and prioritize critical compliance areas.
Why automated compliance testing is key
Manual compliance checks are slow and error-prone, creating challenges for your organization in presenting documentation to auditors. Automated controls testing streamlines tasks, reduces risk, and provides real-time visibility, helping leaders manage demands and proactively fix gaps before audits.
Here’s how:
1. POLICY LIFECYCLE
Always know if your policies are up-to-date
Ensuring robust policy management for compliance demands timely drafting, approval, review, and publishing to ensure regulatory compliance.
Automated controls testing verifies policy publication and acceptance every 24 hours, flagging gaps as “failing” and eliminating manual checks, easing leaders’ workload.
Example
Imagine preparing for a SOC 2 audit and discovering a critical security policy is still in draft mode.
CAT alerts you daily about the failing test, ensuring the policy is approved and published well before the audit.
Outcomes:
- Continuously monitors policy status, preventing non-compliance surprises.
- Saves hours of manual follow-ups on whether policies are published and accepted.
2. EMPLOYEE TRAINING
Automate ISMS and security campaign checks
Automating ISMS and security awareness campaign checks can eliminate the bottleneck of chasing employees for mandatory training.
Automated controls testing helps track training status through compliance and MDM tools, flagging incomplete training every 24 hours and generating follow-up tasks.
Example:
An IT or security team preparing for an ISO 27001 audit runs automated tests and finds that 5% of the workforce has not completed the required security training.
Automated controls testing flags non-compliance early, enabling timely follow-up and ensuring audit readiness.
Outcomes
- Reduces the risk of audit failure due to incomplete security training records.
- Automates remediation to ensure that employees meet training deadlines much before audits.
3. VENDOR RISK MANAGEMENT
No more guessing vendor risk scores
Vendor management is crucial as third-party risks rise, but updating risk scores can drain resources.
Automated controls testing runs continuous assessments, flags outdated scores, and triggers a review if scores are not updated, ensuring compliance across frameworks.
Example:
A cloud provider hasn’t had a risk score for months.
Automated tests detect the gap and notify the GRC team, ensuring continuous vendor risk monitoring.
Outcomes:
- Continuous monitoring of third-party risks with automated, timely tests.
- Less reliance on manual vendor reviews and more proactive management.
4. ACCESS CONTROL
No more missed access reviews
Tracking user access rights for compliance is challenging, especially across multiple frameworks.
Automated controls testing simplifies this by tracking completed and pending reviews, marking them as passing or failing, and helping users prioritize actions to stay compliant.
Example:
An incomplete HIPAA access review causes the compliance test to fail.
The admin notices and follows up with the relevant POC to resolve the issue.
Outcomes:
- Automates access review tracking and prevents outdated permissions.
- Identifies gaps in access reviews and enhances security.
5. CLOUD SECURITY
Real-time assurance for your cloud and applications
As businesses move to the cloud, a strong cloud security strategy is crucial for compliance. Cloud security tools automate daily checks, flagging issues like unencrypted databases or insecure endpoints, and ensuring alignment with frameworks like CMMC or GDPR.
Example:
Automated compliance tests detect unencrypted S3 buckets in dynamic AWS setups, allowing teams to quickly address issues and minimize risk.
Outcomes
- Real-time cloud compliance with automatic configuration checks.
- Immediate risk mitigation by flagging misconfigurations as they occur.
Conclusion
Automated compliance tests enable continuous monitoring and improve audit readiness, fostering a proactive security culture and allowing for easy scalability.
Get in touch to learn more about how Scrut can help automate compliance.
FAQs
1. How does CAT help with continuous compliance?
Scrut’s CAT module runs automated tests to assess your organization’s compliance readiness at that point in time, by monitoring the statuses of artifacts and ongoing tasks. You can then create granular action items and assign to relevant stakeholders.
2. What to do if a test is failing?
It means that some action is to be taken in order to make it compliant. Necessary actions can be taken within Scrut modules or connected applications to make the test compliant. Eg – publishing a data usage policy, or enabling KMS key rotation on AWS.
3. Can it automate the manual aspects of compliance?
While CAT automates many aspects, some tasks still require manual effort, such as uploading fire prevention photos, syncing policies, or onboarding vendors. These can be linked to tests that track progress and completion.
4. How does CAT streamline audits?
All documented evidence and proof of completion of recurring tasks is demonstrated as ready-to-use test results to auditors, which eliminates the constant to-and-fro between teams.
Sources:
- https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/risk/articles/internal-audit-robotic-process-automation-adoption.html
- https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2021-06-08-gartner-survey-shows-62-percent-of-organizations-expect-external-audit-fees-to-increase-in-2021
- https://www.ibm.com/reports/data-breach
