Ask any InfoSec professional what one of their biggest challenges is in day-to-day operations, and the overwhelming majority will tell you they need more resources to keep up with all the frameworks and associated compliance requirements across sprawling business operations. 

It’s quite simple, and very noticeable: Audit fatigue is real. 

What’s the biggest challenge? 

Whether you are preparing for a formal audit or evaluating your program readiness against a published framework, standard, or regulation often compliance activities are executed in a reactive or ad-hoc workstream. This creates difficulty in gaining a holistic view of your overall program progress as your business grows more complex while operating across different business units, geographies, or managing multiple frameworks.  

Even organizations that use automation for certain functions still have manual stopgaps when sharing or consolidating information, such as evidence between teams that can create redundancies across groups, resulting in inefficiencies that quickly drain valuable resources.  

Breaking down compliance requirements into business responsibilities requires a prescriptive balance between speaking the language of the business and ensuring requests meet auditor expectations. For most teams, evidence collection is the most painful part of ensuring your environment is audit-ready. It’s a tedious and time-consuming endeavor for compliance professionals to track, can create confusion and interruptions in the daily tasks for the business, and the amount of evidence across controls required for even one audit can be daunting.  

When the majority of compliance and data management tasks are manual, this adds unnecessary work for teams. In addition, it can create a lack of confidence in the data or unforeseen issues or findings that can prolong the process to prepare for and achieve compliance.  

InfoSec leaders could be juggling external audits, customer audits, internal evaluations focused on different areas of the business for various frameworks and new or changing requirements. Often, small teams are tasked with optimizing processes with their current resources in an effort to keep pace or expand the scope of framework compliance to meet customer expectations and build trust based on externally recognized security standards. 

Measuring and monitoring how an organization is performing against compliance requirements can be a very manual and oftentimes ad hoc task. Lack of consistency in measuring can create gaps and wider issues when evaluating compliance posture. 

What’s the solution?  

Simplify requirements, scale execution, automate monitoring.  

Achieving a continuous state of compliance is impossible without automation. For any organization to scale its InfoSec program while preventing compliance fatigue, it needs an IT security management platform to integrate directly into its tech stack, automate routine manual tasks, and streamline existing workflows.  

Leading companies apply automation across several InfoSec processes, including collecting and verifying evidence, tracking regulatory compliance changes, and mapping risks to controls. Not only will automation lighten the team’s workload, it will also accelerate the organization’s time spent preparing for internal and external audits.  

“If you’re just trying to check a box here, check a box there, and you don’t understand the larger picture or vision of why we’re trying to comply with this framework or regulation, then it does get a little harder,” says Tim Carrington, Information Security Compliance Manager at CSC Global. “You need to make sure the organization understands its importance… and that culture comes from the top.” 

How does it work? 

Introducing OneTrust’s Compliance Automation, built to address and remedy these common issues with speed and accuracy, allowing InfoSec teams to scale existing resources and better balance strategic workstreams. 

Problem-solving capabilities include: 

• Access ready-to-use compliance content and guidance for more than 33 frameworks 
• Generate required controls, and evidence tasks with automated scoping wizard 
• Map and track internal compliance requirements with custom standards and frameworks 
• Centrally manage compliance initiatives and measure progress across control implementations 
• Stay continuously compliant with automated evidence collection 
• Collect once, comply many with proprietary evidence framework 

Features of the tool include: 

• Out-of-the-box compliance content and Guidance — Access controls and evidence tasks along with in-depth templates, guidance and more across 33+ privacy and infosec standards and frameworks 
• Scoping Survey — Automatically generate required controls and evidence tasks based on your operations and framework requirements ​ 
• Compliance Initiatives — create a measurable project plan based on your business scope and framework ​to track requirements and progress 
• Proprietary evidence framework — Eliminate redundant workstreams and go beyond 1:1 control mapping to identify specific evidence of operations to meet unique control requirements 
• Custom standards and frameworks — Seamlessly upload custom compliance requirements — structured, organized and mapped to evidence-based operations with bring-your-own-content  

Compliance is increasingly critical to an organization’s ability to do business. However, point in time compliance no longer cuts it. InfoSec and risk leaders need the means to manage, measure, and communicate across key stakeholders.   

Organizations need the right strategy and systems in place that will prevent duplicative work, strained resources, and overall compliance confusion.  

Learn more about OneTrust’s Compliance Automation tool and how your InfoSec program can collect once, comply many while creating efficiencies for your organization.