Simplifying International Audits

The Pain and Cost of International Audits

Serving international customers means dealing with localized audit requirements. That often means hiring on-the-ground staff and engaging local auditors—both of which introduce risk and inefficiencies:

• Audit misalignment – External auditors form their own view of your systems, often misunderstanding your controls.
• Operational drag – Managing overlapping evidence requests, unnecessary questions, and unfamiliar workflows burns your teams out.

You’re left with two options: build local teams, or work with a partner who can orchestrate the audit end-to-end.

Why Local Teams Often Fail

Building a local audit support team might sound logical—but it rarely scales. Remote teams often:

• Lack firsthand exposure to your global audit strategy
• Struggle to onboard and align new auditors
• Can’t effectively negotiate evidence requests
• Miss the context to select and train the right audit firms

This leads to escalations, errors, and team churn. I’ve yet to see this work at scale without significant rework and overhead.

The Auditor Challenge: Complexity Amplified

Training new auditors—especially international ones—is notoriously difficult. Each firm has its own culture, experience level, and expectations. At AWS we once received the following request from an international auditor:

Please provide a photocopy of the physical wet signatures for every code deployment to prod in the past year across the entire AWS environment.

We had to go back to explain CI/CD pipelines, the nature of digital approvals, and why paper signatures haven’t been used since the ‘90s.

Even worse, these auditors often demand duplicate evidence—rejecting evidence provided in other audits in favor of samples generated during their audit window. This creates redundant, time-consuming work for your team with zero additional value.

A Smarter Way: Let Coalfire Broker International Audits

If Coalfire already audits your organization, we can extend that engagement model internationally—reducing overhead and eliminating redundancies.

We:

• Partner with top-tier audit firms globally (e.g., IRAP, ENS, ISMAP)
• Translate your controls and architecture so foreign auditors understand what they need
• Negotiate request lists and reuse validated evidence wherever possible
• Deliver a single, coordinated audit across borders, frameworks, and teams

You avoid retraining auditors, minimize duplication, and work through a single point of contact—Coalfire.

The icing on the cake: in most cases, this costs the same as going direct.

Case Study: Coalfire’s Consolidated Audit Model

Coalfire’s Consolidated Audit streamlines multi-framework engagements into a single, cohesive process. Our clients experience a unified audit, even when spanning multiple geographies and standards.

Closing Thought: Take Back Control

International audits drain resources, elevate risk, and distract your best teams. By letting Coalfire broker these engagements, you:

• Reduce friction and wasted cycles
• Improve audit quality and consistency
• Scale your program with more control

If your international audits are creating chaos, let’s talk.