Compliance
How to Scale Compliance by Consolidating Auditors (Without Increasing Risk)
Compliance programs often grow organically—fast, messy, and driven by customer or regulatory demands. Before you know it, you’re juggling a dozen vendors, dozens of audits, and drowning in evidence requests – including many duplicates. Some cloud providers now undergo 400+ audits per year for certifications, direct customer audits, and regulatory exams.
In this series, I’ll share strategies to streamline compliance operations. Today’s focus: how consolidating audit vendors can reduce overhead, accelerate delivery, and make your program scalable for the future.
The Hidden Risks of Too Many Auditors
It’s no secret: independent security audits build trust with customers and help them meet their own compliance requirements. Most companies, in response, build out security assessment vendor portfolios over time—often piecemeal and without an overarching strategy.
But hiring multiple vendors introduces:
- Security risk, by increasing exposure of sensitive information across multiple firms
- Operational drag, from managing overlapping audit evidence requests and multiple audit engagements
At AWS, I remember having heated discussions whenever we considered adding a new certification. We worried about risks to security and engineering velocity. Every decision was intentional, focused on minimizing disruption.
Work Backwards from Delivery
As the audit portfolio organically grows, compliance teams can find themselves buried in vendor management: coordinating schedules, setting budgets, generating purchase orders, collecting evidence, closing out engagements. As vendor requests increase, teams need to create an extensive common control framework to handle the complexity of the different vendors coming in asking for overlapping evidence. This work is difficult and varies in effectiveness in delivering what really matters.
So what really matters? Audit delivery.
Work backward from the result you want: complete, trustworthy audit reports delivered on time. Everything else should support that goal. When you focus here, unnecessary steps and inefficiencies become easier to eliminate.
Ask yourself: Can we produce the same number of audits with less effort? The answer is almost always yes.
Why Consolidating Vendors Makes Sense
Managing multiple audit vendors means:
- Duplicated evidence collection
- Competing timelines
- Redundant coordination efforts
Now imagine if one firm handled most or all of your audits:
- A single audit request list
- Shared and reusable evidence
- One point of contact for scheduling and delivery
- International audits brokered through one lead vendor
While full consolidation might not be feasible for every company, the closer you move toward this model, the greater the efficiency gains.
There is a performance risk to centralization. If your vendor drops the ball, multiple audits may be affected. But this risk is mitigated by simpler inspection and escalation paths, allowing you to drive improvements with a single partner.
Case Study: Coalfire’s Consolidated Audit Model
At Coalfire, we developed the Consolidated Audit to deliver exactly this kind of harmonization. For every client that consolidates with us, the audit feels like a single engagement, even when covering multiple frameworks.
Using our Compliance Essentials platform, we map evidence across frameworks to enable maximum reuse. Our customers consistently report:
- 16–37% evidence leverage for each added certification framework
- Reduced overhead for coordination and reporting
- Compliance teams freeing up time for other things
The more audits our clients consolidate, the more benefit they see. It’s a reinforcing loop: less noise, more delivery.
Final Thought
Vendor harmonization isn’t just about cutting costs—it’s about scaling with confidence. If you're buried in audit chaos, consider how vendor consolidation could cut your overhead by 30% or more.