Most compliance programs don't fail because the policies are wrong. They fail because the policies sit in a binder nobody opens, the evidence is scattered across a dozen inboxes, and no one can actually prove the program works when an auditor or a regulator comes asking.
A compliance program is supposed to prevent exactly that. Done well, it's the organization-wide system of policies, procedures, and oversight that keeps you aligned with the standards and regulations your business depends on, while protecting sensitive data, sharpening your reputation, and giving every employee a clear sense of their role in keeping the company compliant.
But "done well" is the hard part. A program that genuinely works is active rather than static, centralized rather than scattered, and backed by data rather than good intentions. This article walks through how to build one, starting with what a compliance program actually is and the seven elements every effective program shares. From there it lays out a practical five-step process for standing one up, the four stages programs move through as they mature, and how to measure whether yours is working, before closing on the predictable reasons programs fail so you can design around them from the start.
What is a compliance program?
A compliance program is an organization-wide system of guidelines, procedures, and best practices designed to ensure adherence to applicable industry standards and regulations. A robust compliance program goes beyond helping fulfill legal or regulatory compliance; it also provides a comprehensive set of internal policies that personnel and systems of an organization should follow to protect confidential and sensitive data and enhance brand reputation.
Developing a compliance program helps your organization be pragmatic in a dynamic risk landscape. It bolsters your compliance efforts in several ways, such as:
- Practical budget assignments and cost controls for compliance
- Orientation and continuous training of compliance professionals and employees
- Proactive non-compliance remediation options
All of the above ensures more clarity and gets your teams on the same page, helping everyone understand their role in your organization’s compliance management efforts.
Why you should develop a compliance program
Building a compliance program brings numerous benefits, most notably:
- Demonstrable commitment to responsible GRC operations: A structured compliance program shows stakeholders that you’re willing to invest the necessary time and effort in effective GRC. This also makes customers more likely to do business with you.
- Reduced risk of reputational or legal damage and penalties: Non-compliance carries significant financial and reputational risks, even with voluntary standards and frameworks. A compliance program defines internal policies to monitor compliance workflows and remediate non-compliance risks in time.
- Cost-effectiveness and resource optimization: A compliance program is a worthy investment because it eliminates expenses associated with non-compliance. It also helps remove redundant operations and allocate resources where needed most to bridge any compliance gaps.
- Improved ethical conduct and productivity: A compliance program gives employees a specific code of conduct to follow, eliminating guesswork, related inefficiencies, and potential misconduct
- Proactive course correction: A compliance program establishes a clear system for resolving misconduct or deviations, reducing the risk of undesirable circumstances harming your overall compliance posture.
{{cta_withimage3="/cta-blocks"}}
Key elements of an effective compliance program
Every organization’s compliance program is different and depends on factors like its industry and the specific standards applicable. Still, all compliance programs have the following seven components in common:
Accountability and oversight
Someone needs to own the program. Define clear roles and responsibilities and name a compliance leader with the authority to make decisions and keep things moving. Without a named owner, compliance becomes everyone's job and therefore no one's.
Communication channels
Your program only works if people know the rules and can speak up when something's wrong. Decide who communicates policies to employees, and give people a way to report misconduct or concerns without fear of retaliation. A reporting channel that employees trust is one of the strongest signals that your program is real rather than decorative.
Training and education
Policies don't teach themselves. Every employee who touches your compliance posture, directly or indirectly, should be trained on the practices that keep you compliant, with particular attention to security and privacy awareness. Pay close attention to training when you adopt a new framework, since that's when expectations shift fastest.
Enforcement and discipline
Rules without consequences are suggestions. Your compliance leader and other authorities need to enforce policies consistently and act on major deviations quickly. Uneven enforcement does more damage than no enforcement, because it tells people the rules are optional.
Continuous monitoring
Oversight has to be ongoing, not annual. Pair your monitoring with automation wherever you can, so you get real-time visibility into how the program is running and which tasks are slipping. This is the element that keeps you compliant between audits instead of scrambling before each one, and it's where modern tooling earns its keep through continuous compliance.
Response and remediation
Things will go wrong, so plan for it. Spell out the types of misconduct your company recognizes, make the consequences clear, and build a documented path for fixing issues when they surface. A program that can respond quickly and consistently is the one regulators and customers actually trust.
How to develop a compliance program in five steps
Let’s go over the steps you should take to develop a compliance program. Specifically, you need to do the following:
Step 1: Define policies and standards
A compliance program is built on a clear foundation of policies and standards, so this step is all about defining them. When doing so, use any specific frameworks you’re complying with as a reference point. Understand the framework’s requirements and then translate them into the standards or rules your employees should follow.
In some cases, you may want (or need) to comply with multiple recognized frameworks and standards. If this happens, make sure to check for any overlap between their requirements to avoid workflow duplications. You may be able to achieve several efficiencies with a single policy, which simplifies your program communication and establishment.
Remember to get everyone on board when defining your policies — especially senior management such as C-level executives who have a deep understanding of the ethical and legal standards your organization is expected to maintain. It’s also good practice to designate a lead compliance program officer with the authority to make decisions as required.
Step 2: Set up an evidence collection system
A well-built documentation and evidence collection system is crucial for successful compliance. It helps your team conduct effective internal audits and prepare for external audits if you’re pursuing any certifications. Mind that organizations often encounter three problems when building an evidence collection system:
- Excessive manual tasks for record-keeping
- Tracking evidence across disparate systems
- Maintaining a trail of scattered evidence sources like email chains, screenshots, etc.
To overcome these obstacles, you should use an automated compliance management system. It automatically pulls relevant data and turns it into actionable insights displayed on a unified dashboard which reduces manual efforts and allows you to work on your compliance program instead of working in it.
Step 3: Conduct risk assessments
Within the scope of a compliance program, risk assessments refer to identifying and neutralizing any risk of falling out of compliance or risks to the business’ security and integrity at large. Due to the increase in the number of data, privacy, and security compliances, most compliance risks are related to data violations and poor access controls.
Depending on the scale and scope of your compliance program, you can classify risks using various risk assessment approaches, such as:
- Quantitative
- Qualitative
- Semi-quantitative
- Threat-based
Since your organization’s risk profile evolves with time, it’s crucial to conduct assessments regularly — at a minimum annually. As with the previous step, you can automate various tasks, like risk scoring and control checks, to ensure your assessments aren’t time-consuming.
Remember that after compiling risk assessment findings, you should come up with remediation strategies. Pay special attention to mitigating critical threats that can disrupt your business or tarnish its reputation and reach out to a risk consultant if needed.
Step 4: Develop a compliance training program
When it comes to minimizing errors and misconduct, prevention is important and effective compliance training can help. Ideally, every employee who directly or indirectly contributes to your compliance status should be educated on the necessary policies and practices to avoid compliance-related risks, especially security and privacy awareness training.
One of the best practices is to make educational content easily accessible to the relevant parties. Compliance content can be quite complex, so try to make it digestible by simplifying jargon and specifying easy-to-follow steps. You can also create microlearning modules that guide employees through all the necessary policies without overwhelming them.
Other useful tips for making your compliance training effective include the following:
- Gamify training through milestones and incentives.
- Use scenario-based learning to demonstrate the impact of undesirable behavior on your compliance posture.
- Make educational content more informal through engaging visuals and narrative formats.
{{cta_withimage28="/cta-blocks"}} | AI Security assessment template
Step 5: Implement an auditing and reporting system
It’s hard to assess your compliance program’s effectiveness without regular audits. You should conduct them internally to determine if you’re compliant with the necessary standards and regulations and as applicable, ready for an external audit.
An internal compliance audit is a deeply investigative process that consists of various steps, such as:
- Defining the scope, frequency, and procedures
- Interviewing stakeholders and gathering documentation
- Analyzing data and turning it into insights
- Creating the final report and sharing it with stakeholders
It’s worth noting that compliance professionals often find internal audits overwhelming because they’re time-consuming and tend to disrupt regular operations. Still, you should not put off an audit if you want to accurately measure the efficacy of your compliance program.
The good news is that you can automate audits much like other aspects of your compliance program. By leveraging the right software, you can gain access to live insights into your security and compliance posture without extra legwork.
The four stages of compliance program maturity
Not every compliance program is at the same place, and yours doesn't need to be at the finish line to be working. Programs tend to move through four stages as they grow, from a manual scramble toward a system that mostly runs itself. Finding your stage tells you what to fix next and keeps you from chasing maturity you don't need yet.
The table below is a quick way to locate yourself. Most companies straddle two stages at once, and that's normal.
Stage 1: Ad hoc
At this stage there's no program to speak of, just compliance work that happens when something forces it. A prospect asks for a SOC 2 report, so you scramble. The cost here is hidden but real, since every requirement becomes a fire drill and nothing carries over to the next one. The goal isn't perfection, it's simply getting your policies written down and your evidence into one place so you stop starting from zero each time.
Stage 2: Reactive
You've cleared a first audit and have some structure, but the program still runs on your calendar's terms rather than your own. Requirements get handled as they surface, and controls quietly drift out of compliance between audit cycles because nobody's watching them in between. Moving past this stage means shifting from answering requirements to staying ahead of them, which usually starts with monitoring controls more often than once a year.
Stage 3: Proactive
Now you have a real program. Someone owns it, the policies are current, controls get checked on a defined schedule, and an upcoming audit no longer triggers a company-wide panic. This is a strong place to be, and many growing companies operate here comfortably for years. The work that remains is reducing the manual effort that still eats your team's time and tightening how quickly you catch and fix issues.
Stage 4: Optimized
At the top of the curve, the program runs continuously and largely on its own. Automated tests catch problems as they happen, one set of evidence satisfies many frameworks at once, and you can answer "is our program working" with live data instead of a quarterly guess. This is also the stage that holds up best under the scrutiny we'll cover next, since regulators and enterprise buyers increasingly expect exactly this kind of always-on, data-backed proof. Getting here by hand is very difficult, which is why automation is what carries a program from proactive to optimized.
How to measure whether your compliance program is working
A program is only as good as your ability to prove it works. This is the part most companies underinvest in, and it's now the part regulators look at hardest. You don't need a perfect program. You need one you can measure, show, and improve, with data to back every claim.
Start with metrics you can actually track. A handful of numbers tell you most of what you need to know about program health:
- Policy acceptance rate: the share of employees who have read and signed off on current policies
- Training completion: how many people finished required training, and how fast
- Control pass rate: the percentage of your controls passing their tests at any given moment
- Time to remediate: how long it takes to fix a failing control or close a finding
- Audit findings over time: whether issues are trending down audit over audit
- Reporting volume: how often employees use your reporting channels, which signals whether people trust them
That last metric carries more weight than it looks. Low reporting numbers can signal that employees don't trust the channel rather than that there's nothing to report, which is one factor regulators may weigh.
This isn't only good practice anymore, it's the standard you're judged against. When the U.S. Department of Justice updated its Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs guidance in September 2024, it sharpened the focus on exactly this. Prosecutors now ask whether a company's compliance team has timely access to the data it needs, and whether the company uses data analytics to track how well its program is working. In practice, that means a program you can't measure with data is harder to defend to prosecutors, regardless of how strong the policies look on paper.
This is where continuous monitoring separates a real program from a paper one. Annual snapshots tell you how things looked on one day. Continuous control monitoring tells you how things look right now, catches drift the week it happens, and gives you the running data trail that both regulators and customers expect. Vanta runs automated tests continuously and surfaces these metrics in the Report Center, so measurement stops being a quarterly fire drill and becomes something your program produces on its own. Measurement also closes the loop, feeding what you learn back into your risk assessments and remediation so the program keeps improving on its own metrics.
Why compliance programs fail
Most program failures aren't mysterious. They trace back to a few predictable patterns, and once you can name them, you can design around them. Here are the four that sink programs most often, and the fix for each.
Policies that exist only on paper
This is the most common failure of all. The policies exist, the binder looks impressive, and nobody actually follows any of it. A program that lives only on paper gives you a false sense of safety right up until an auditor, a regulator, or a breach proves otherwise. The fix is training and enforcement. People have to know the rules, and the rules have to carry real consequences, or the documentation is just decoration.
Drift between audits
Plenty of companies pass an audit and then quietly fall out of compliance over the following months. A control breaks, a new system goes live without proper access controls, an offboarding gets missed, and nobody notices until the next audit cycle forces a scramble. Catching this early is the heart of compliance risk management. When you treat compliance as an ongoing risk to monitor rather than a once-a-year event, a broken control becomes a flagged issue in days instead of a finding at your next audit. The fix is continuous monitoring, which gives you that ongoing visibility instead of point-in-time snapshots.
Tool and evidence sprawl
When your evidence lives across a dozen disconnected tools, spreadsheets, and inboxes, no one can see the whole picture, and assembling it for an audit becomes a project of its own. Sprawl also hides gaps, because you can't fix what you can't find. The fix is a single source of truth that pulls everything into one place, and automated compliance software is what gives you that without the manual assembly, so your posture is always visible rather than reconstructed under pressure.
No way to measure it
A program you can't measure is a program you can't defend, to your board, your customers, or a regulator. Without metrics and the data access behind them, you're guessing about whether the program works. The fix is the measurement discipline from the last section, built on data your team can reach and trust.
The thread running through all four is the same. Programs fail when they're static, scattered, and unmeasured. They hold up when they're active, centralized, and backed by data, which is exactly what modern tooling is built to deliver.
Build a comprehensive compliance program with Vanta
It’s common for compliance managers to experience various bottlenecks while building and executing their compliance programs. Keeping these roadblocks in mind, Vanta gives you the easiest way to create and run a cohesive compliance program.
You get a robust Agentic Trust Platform with pre-built compliance workflows for 35+ frameworks and standards, such as:
You can also set up custom frameworks from scratch to monitor any specific compliance needs. Vanta automates several areas of your compliance program, reducing up to 90% of the manual work. Compliance teams can especially benefit from the following functionalities:
- A centralized hub offering full visibility into evidence collected.
- Built-in tools and guidance to fix non-compliance.
- 400+ integrations with tools like datastore providers and document management systems.
- Vanta AI with smart suggestions for everything from tests to controls.
- Access review solutions to streamline and centralize recurring review processes.
- Automated risk assessment reports for continuous compliance
You can also use Vanta’s Trust Center to demonstrate trustworthiness to stakeholders and tie your compliance program to revenue with clear ROIs. It lets you showcase your latest security and compliance posture, helping your organization build and maintain a solid reputation as you mature your compliance program.
If you wish to automate your compliance program end to end, explore Vanta’s integrated GRC solution. You can also schedule a custom demo to explore some neat features tailored to your compliance functions.
{{cta_simple29="/cta-blocks"}} | Automated compliance product page
Compliance
How to build a compliance program and keep it compliant
Looking to upgrade to continuous, automated GRC and get visibility across your entire program?
Most compliance programs don't fail because the policies are wrong. They fail because the policies sit in a binder nobody opens, the evidence is scattered across a dozen inboxes, and no one can actually prove the program works when an auditor or a regulator comes asking.
A compliance program is supposed to prevent exactly that. Done well, it's the organization-wide system of policies, procedures, and oversight that keeps you aligned with the standards and regulations your business depends on, while protecting sensitive data, sharpening your reputation, and giving every employee a clear sense of their role in keeping the company compliant.
But "done well" is the hard part. A program that genuinely works is active rather than static, centralized rather than scattered, and backed by data rather than good intentions. This article walks through how to build one, starting with what a compliance program actually is and the seven elements every effective program shares. From there it lays out a practical five-step process for standing one up, the four stages programs move through as they mature, and how to measure whether yours is working, before closing on the predictable reasons programs fail so you can design around them from the start.
What is a compliance program?
A compliance program is an organization-wide system of guidelines, procedures, and best practices designed to ensure adherence to applicable industry standards and regulations. A robust compliance program goes beyond helping fulfill legal or regulatory compliance; it also provides a comprehensive set of internal policies that personnel and systems of an organization should follow to protect confidential and sensitive data and enhance brand reputation.
Developing a compliance program helps your organization be pragmatic in a dynamic risk landscape. It bolsters your compliance efforts in several ways, such as:
- Practical budget assignments and cost controls for compliance
- Orientation and continuous training of compliance professionals and employees
- Proactive non-compliance remediation options
All of the above ensures more clarity and gets your teams on the same page, helping everyone understand their role in your organization’s compliance management efforts.
Why you should develop a compliance program
Building a compliance program brings numerous benefits, most notably:
- Demonstrable commitment to responsible GRC operations: A structured compliance program shows stakeholders that you’re willing to invest the necessary time and effort in effective GRC. This also makes customers more likely to do business with you.
- Reduced risk of reputational or legal damage and penalties: Non-compliance carries significant financial and reputational risks, even with voluntary standards and frameworks. A compliance program defines internal policies to monitor compliance workflows and remediate non-compliance risks in time.
- Cost-effectiveness and resource optimization: A compliance program is a worthy investment because it eliminates expenses associated with non-compliance. It also helps remove redundant operations and allocate resources where needed most to bridge any compliance gaps.
- Improved ethical conduct and productivity: A compliance program gives employees a specific code of conduct to follow, eliminating guesswork, related inefficiencies, and potential misconduct
- Proactive course correction: A compliance program establishes a clear system for resolving misconduct or deviations, reducing the risk of undesirable circumstances harming your overall compliance posture.
{{cta_withimage3="/cta-blocks"}}
Key elements of an effective compliance program
Every organization’s compliance program is different and depends on factors like its industry and the specific standards applicable. Still, all compliance programs have the following seven components in common:
Accountability and oversight
Someone needs to own the program. Define clear roles and responsibilities and name a compliance leader with the authority to make decisions and keep things moving. Without a named owner, compliance becomes everyone's job and therefore no one's.
Communication channels
Your program only works if people know the rules and can speak up when something's wrong. Decide who communicates policies to employees, and give people a way to report misconduct or concerns without fear of retaliation. A reporting channel that employees trust is one of the strongest signals that your program is real rather than decorative.
Training and education
Policies don't teach themselves. Every employee who touches your compliance posture, directly or indirectly, should be trained on the practices that keep you compliant, with particular attention to security and privacy awareness. Pay close attention to training when you adopt a new framework, since that's when expectations shift fastest.
Enforcement and discipline
Rules without consequences are suggestions. Your compliance leader and other authorities need to enforce policies consistently and act on major deviations quickly. Uneven enforcement does more damage than no enforcement, because it tells people the rules are optional.
Continuous monitoring
Oversight has to be ongoing, not annual. Pair your monitoring with automation wherever you can, so you get real-time visibility into how the program is running and which tasks are slipping. This is the element that keeps you compliant between audits instead of scrambling before each one, and it's where modern tooling earns its keep through continuous compliance.
Response and remediation
Things will go wrong, so plan for it. Spell out the types of misconduct your company recognizes, make the consequences clear, and build a documented path for fixing issues when they surface. A program that can respond quickly and consistently is the one regulators and customers actually trust.
How to develop a compliance program in five steps
Let’s go over the steps you should take to develop a compliance program. Specifically, you need to do the following:
Step 1: Define policies and standards
A compliance program is built on a clear foundation of policies and standards, so this step is all about defining them. When doing so, use any specific frameworks you’re complying with as a reference point. Understand the framework’s requirements and then translate them into the standards or rules your employees should follow.
In some cases, you may want (or need) to comply with multiple recognized frameworks and standards. If this happens, make sure to check for any overlap between their requirements to avoid workflow duplications. You may be able to achieve several efficiencies with a single policy, which simplifies your program communication and establishment.
Remember to get everyone on board when defining your policies — especially senior management such as C-level executives who have a deep understanding of the ethical and legal standards your organization is expected to maintain. It’s also good practice to designate a lead compliance program officer with the authority to make decisions as required.
Step 2: Set up an evidence collection system
A well-built documentation and evidence collection system is crucial for successful compliance. It helps your team conduct effective internal audits and prepare for external audits if you’re pursuing any certifications. Mind that organizations often encounter three problems when building an evidence collection system:
- Excessive manual tasks for record-keeping
- Tracking evidence across disparate systems
- Maintaining a trail of scattered evidence sources like email chains, screenshots, etc.
To overcome these obstacles, you should use an automated compliance management system. It automatically pulls relevant data and turns it into actionable insights displayed on a unified dashboard which reduces manual efforts and allows you to work on your compliance program instead of working in it.
Step 3: Conduct risk assessments
Within the scope of a compliance program, risk assessments refer to identifying and neutralizing any risk of falling out of compliance or risks to the business’ security and integrity at large. Due to the increase in the number of data, privacy, and security compliances, most compliance risks are related to data violations and poor access controls.
Depending on the scale and scope of your compliance program, you can classify risks using various risk assessment approaches, such as:
- Quantitative
- Qualitative
- Semi-quantitative
- Threat-based
Since your organization’s risk profile evolves with time, it’s crucial to conduct assessments regularly — at a minimum annually. As with the previous step, you can automate various tasks, like risk scoring and control checks, to ensure your assessments aren’t time-consuming.
Remember that after compiling risk assessment findings, you should come up with remediation strategies. Pay special attention to mitigating critical threats that can disrupt your business or tarnish its reputation and reach out to a risk consultant if needed.
Step 4: Develop a compliance training program
When it comes to minimizing errors and misconduct, prevention is important and effective compliance training can help. Ideally, every employee who directly or indirectly contributes to your compliance status should be educated on the necessary policies and practices to avoid compliance-related risks, especially security and privacy awareness training.
One of the best practices is to make educational content easily accessible to the relevant parties. Compliance content can be quite complex, so try to make it digestible by simplifying jargon and specifying easy-to-follow steps. You can also create microlearning modules that guide employees through all the necessary policies without overwhelming them.
Other useful tips for making your compliance training effective include the following:
- Gamify training through milestones and incentives.
- Use scenario-based learning to demonstrate the impact of undesirable behavior on your compliance posture.
- Make educational content more informal through engaging visuals and narrative formats.
{{cta_withimage28="/cta-blocks"}} | AI Security assessment template
Step 5: Implement an auditing and reporting system
It’s hard to assess your compliance program’s effectiveness without regular audits. You should conduct them internally to determine if you’re compliant with the necessary standards and regulations and as applicable, ready for an external audit.
An internal compliance audit is a deeply investigative process that consists of various steps, such as:
- Defining the scope, frequency, and procedures
- Interviewing stakeholders and gathering documentation
- Analyzing data and turning it into insights
- Creating the final report and sharing it with stakeholders
It’s worth noting that compliance professionals often find internal audits overwhelming because they’re time-consuming and tend to disrupt regular operations. Still, you should not put off an audit if you want to accurately measure the efficacy of your compliance program.
The good news is that you can automate audits much like other aspects of your compliance program. By leveraging the right software, you can gain access to live insights into your security and compliance posture without extra legwork.
The four stages of compliance program maturity
Not every compliance program is at the same place, and yours doesn't need to be at the finish line to be working. Programs tend to move through four stages as they grow, from a manual scramble toward a system that mostly runs itself. Finding your stage tells you what to fix next and keeps you from chasing maturity you don't need yet.
The table below is a quick way to locate yourself. Most companies straddle two stages at once, and that's normal.
Stage 1: Ad hoc
At this stage there's no program to speak of, just compliance work that happens when something forces it. A prospect asks for a SOC 2 report, so you scramble. The cost here is hidden but real, since every requirement becomes a fire drill and nothing carries over to the next one. The goal isn't perfection, it's simply getting your policies written down and your evidence into one place so you stop starting from zero each time.
Stage 2: Reactive
You've cleared a first audit and have some structure, but the program still runs on your calendar's terms rather than your own. Requirements get handled as they surface, and controls quietly drift out of compliance between audit cycles because nobody's watching them in between. Moving past this stage means shifting from answering requirements to staying ahead of them, which usually starts with monitoring controls more often than once a year.
Stage 3: Proactive
Now you have a real program. Someone owns it, the policies are current, controls get checked on a defined schedule, and an upcoming audit no longer triggers a company-wide panic. This is a strong place to be, and many growing companies operate here comfortably for years. The work that remains is reducing the manual effort that still eats your team's time and tightening how quickly you catch and fix issues.
Stage 4: Optimized
At the top of the curve, the program runs continuously and largely on its own. Automated tests catch problems as they happen, one set of evidence satisfies many frameworks at once, and you can answer "is our program working" with live data instead of a quarterly guess. This is also the stage that holds up best under the scrutiny we'll cover next, since regulators and enterprise buyers increasingly expect exactly this kind of always-on, data-backed proof. Getting here by hand is very difficult, which is why automation is what carries a program from proactive to optimized.
How to measure whether your compliance program is working
A program is only as good as your ability to prove it works. This is the part most companies underinvest in, and it's now the part regulators look at hardest. You don't need a perfect program. You need one you can measure, show, and improve, with data to back every claim.
Start with metrics you can actually track. A handful of numbers tell you most of what you need to know about program health:
- Policy acceptance rate: the share of employees who have read and signed off on current policies
- Training completion: how many people finished required training, and how fast
- Control pass rate: the percentage of your controls passing their tests at any given moment
- Time to remediate: how long it takes to fix a failing control or close a finding
- Audit findings over time: whether issues are trending down audit over audit
- Reporting volume: how often employees use your reporting channels, which signals whether people trust them
That last metric carries more weight than it looks. Low reporting numbers can signal that employees don't trust the channel rather than that there's nothing to report, which is one factor regulators may weigh.
This isn't only good practice anymore, it's the standard you're judged against. When the U.S. Department of Justice updated its Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs guidance in September 2024, it sharpened the focus on exactly this. Prosecutors now ask whether a company's compliance team has timely access to the data it needs, and whether the company uses data analytics to track how well its program is working. In practice, that means a program you can't measure with data is harder to defend to prosecutors, regardless of how strong the policies look on paper.
This is where continuous monitoring separates a real program from a paper one. Annual snapshots tell you how things looked on one day. Continuous control monitoring tells you how things look right now, catches drift the week it happens, and gives you the running data trail that both regulators and customers expect. Vanta runs automated tests continuously and surfaces these metrics in the Report Center, so measurement stops being a quarterly fire drill and becomes something your program produces on its own. Measurement also closes the loop, feeding what you learn back into your risk assessments and remediation so the program keeps improving on its own metrics.
Why compliance programs fail
Most program failures aren't mysterious. They trace back to a few predictable patterns, and once you can name them, you can design around them. Here are the four that sink programs most often, and the fix for each.
Policies that exist only on paper
This is the most common failure of all. The policies exist, the binder looks impressive, and nobody actually follows any of it. A program that lives only on paper gives you a false sense of safety right up until an auditor, a regulator, or a breach proves otherwise. The fix is training and enforcement. People have to know the rules, and the rules have to carry real consequences, or the documentation is just decoration.
Drift between audits
Plenty of companies pass an audit and then quietly fall out of compliance over the following months. A control breaks, a new system goes live without proper access controls, an offboarding gets missed, and nobody notices until the next audit cycle forces a scramble. Catching this early is the heart of compliance risk management. When you treat compliance as an ongoing risk to monitor rather than a once-a-year event, a broken control becomes a flagged issue in days instead of a finding at your next audit. The fix is continuous monitoring, which gives you that ongoing visibility instead of point-in-time snapshots.
Tool and evidence sprawl
When your evidence lives across a dozen disconnected tools, spreadsheets, and inboxes, no one can see the whole picture, and assembling it for an audit becomes a project of its own. Sprawl also hides gaps, because you can't fix what you can't find. The fix is a single source of truth that pulls everything into one place, and automated compliance software is what gives you that without the manual assembly, so your posture is always visible rather than reconstructed under pressure.
No way to measure it
A program you can't measure is a program you can't defend, to your board, your customers, or a regulator. Without metrics and the data access behind them, you're guessing about whether the program works. The fix is the measurement discipline from the last section, built on data your team can reach and trust.
The thread running through all four is the same. Programs fail when they're static, scattered, and unmeasured. They hold up when they're active, centralized, and backed by data, which is exactly what modern tooling is built to deliver.
Build a comprehensive compliance program with Vanta
It’s common for compliance managers to experience various bottlenecks while building and executing their compliance programs. Keeping these roadblocks in mind, Vanta gives you the easiest way to create and run a cohesive compliance program.
You get a robust Agentic Trust Platform with pre-built compliance workflows for 35+ frameworks and standards, such as:
You can also set up custom frameworks from scratch to monitor any specific compliance needs. Vanta automates several areas of your compliance program, reducing up to 90% of the manual work. Compliance teams can especially benefit from the following functionalities:
- A centralized hub offering full visibility into evidence collected.
- Built-in tools and guidance to fix non-compliance.
- 400+ integrations with tools like datastore providers and document management systems.
- Vanta AI with smart suggestions for everything from tests to controls.
- Access review solutions to streamline and centralize recurring review processes.
- Automated risk assessment reports for continuous compliance
You can also use Vanta’s Trust Center to demonstrate trustworthiness to stakeholders and tie your compliance program to revenue with clear ROIs. It lets you showcase your latest security and compliance posture, helping your organization build and maintain a solid reputation as you mature your compliance program.
If you wish to automate your compliance program end to end, explore Vanta’s integrated GRC solution. You can also schedule a custom demo to explore some neat features tailored to your compliance functions.
{{cta_simple29="/cta-blocks"}} | Automated compliance product page
| Role: | GRC responsibilities: |
|---|---|
| Board of directors | Central to the overarching GRC strategy, this group sets the direction for the compliance strategy. They determine which standards and regulations are necessary for compliance and align the GRC strategy with business objectives. |
| Chief financial officer | Primary responsibility for the success of the GRC program and for reporting results to the board. |
| Operations managers from relevant departments | This group owns processes. They are responsible for the success and direction of risk management and compliance within their departments. |
| Representatives from relevant departments | These are the activity owners. These team members are responsible for carrying out specific compliance and risk management tasks within their departments and for integrating these tasks into their workflows. |
| Contract managers from relevant department | These team members are responsible for managing interactions with vendors and other third parties in their department to ensure all risk management and compliance measures are being taken. |
| Chief information security officer (CISO) | Defines the organization’s information security policy, designs risk and vulnerability assessments, and develops information security policies. |
| Data protection officer (DPO) or legal counsel | Develops goals for data privacy based on legal regulations and other compliance needs, designs and implements privacy policies and practices, and assesses these practices for effectiveness. |
| GRC lead | Responsible for overseeing the execution of the GRC program in collaboration with the executive team as well as maintaining the organization’s library of security controls. |
| Cybersecurity analyst(s) | Implements and monitors cybersecurity measures that are in line with the GRC program and business objectives. |
| Compliance analyst(s) | Monitors the organization’s compliance with all regulations and standards necessary, identifies any compliance gaps, and works to mitigate them. |
| Risk analyst(s) | Carries out the risk management program for the organization and serves as a resource for risk management across various departments, including identifying, mitigating, and monitoring risks. |
| IT security specialist(s) | Implements security controls within the IT system in coordination with the cybersecurity analyst(s). |
Explore more GRC articles
Introduction to GRC
Implementing a GRC program
Optimizing a GRC program
Governance
Risk
Compliance
Continuous control monitoring
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