End the Compliance Management Blues

Everyone’s heard about the quantitative benefits of automation, but how does automation, specifically compliance automation, impact the quality of life of auditees?

Compliance audits shouldn’t be a pain

Operating a compliant environment may feel great, but demonstrating compliance to an auditor is about as fun as figuring out your elderly parents' Wi-Fi password (hint: just check the manufacturer’s sticker on the router).

But why is that? Why don’t we experience the same sense of joy as a toddler showing off something they’re proud of? Maybe it’s because we don’t make toddlers track hundreds of controls in spreadsheets, map each of those controls to owners and evidence, and then play middleman between the auditor and control owners to coordinate the collection of that evidence and subsequent follow-up questions before they can hang their picture on the fridge.

Surely there’s a better way to rediscover the thrill of showing off your compliant environment. Surely there’s a reason I just made you relive all the bad memories of past audits. What if I told you we developed a SaaS-based compliance solution to end your compliance auditing blues?

Compliance Essentials’ new upgrade

Last year we introduced Compliance Essentials, the next-generation compliance management platform that marked the industry’s most advanced combination of SaaS technology, expert guidance, and audit services. This year, we took it to the next level and recently unveiled a huge update that will make your life much easier. Coalfire teamed up with one of the world’s leading security technology engineering firms, anecdotes, to expand Compliance Essentials’ capabilities – automating compliance workflows and risks, evidence collection, and audit execution. All within one platform.

Compliance management automated workflow has arrived

Compliance Essentials’ new update includes an off-the-shelf mapping at an evidence level between 40+ compliance frameworks in addition to evidence status tracking, assignment of control/evidence owners, automated reminders of due dates, built-in comment functionality for controls and evidence, expert guidance for evidence and controls, compliance dashboards, and much more.

Sounds fancy – but how does that actually help compliance “spark joy?”

Compliance Essentials’ automated workflow means you don’t have to:

• Track each compliance framework separately.
• Communicate deadlines and send reminders of due dates to control owners.
• Facilitate discussions between your auditor and control owners.
• Spend time wondering what a requirement in a compliance framework means, or manually track and calculate audit status for your boss.
• Operate in silos, with gatekeepers controlling access to important compliance information.

Meet the better way to collect evidence

Evidence collection. These two words send shivers down the spines of just about every compliance manager. The evidence-collection process is often a manual, tedious, time-consuming process that diverts team members from focusing on other job responsibilities. Instead of managing risk and making the world a safer place, compliance managers are stuck playing middleman between the auditors and control owners.

This automated evidence collection enables users to connect over 35 of the most common off-the-shelf tools to Compliance Essentials and automatically import artifacts to the applicable evidence items. The automated collection of evidence means system admins, HR personnel, SOC personnel, developers, cloud infrastructure team, mobile device management team, etc., won’t have to spend as much time collecting evidence for the audit.

Additionally, the automated collection of evidence gives an organization’s compliance experts visibility into the compliance status of a variety of controls throughout the year.

This means:

• No more surprise changes in the control environment to discover during the audit.
• More timely identification of, or changes to, risks by compliance personnel.

To put it in simple terms: Users can manage compliance workflows and risks, automatically collect evidence, and execute audits — all in one place.

Compliance automation can bring joy

Compliance Essentials automated workflow and evidence collection reduces the burden of manual evidence collection by up to 50% and cuts internal compliance costs by up to 40%. While yes, that does mean a lot of money saved, it also means you’ll have more time to focus on the aspects of your job that you’re passionate about (and make it home on time for dinner, even during the “busy season”). That’s bound to create joy no matter where you are.

If you have questions about Compliance Essentials or how to simplify the compliance auditing process, learn more about Compliance Essentials.