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Most established industry frameworks require annual audits and assessments to ensure ongoing compliance. Usually, passing audits involves presenting information that reflects your compliance at a specific point in time. Although useful, relying on this data type carries the risk of not noticing incidents, violations, and compliance drift for months.
This is where continuous compliance comes in as a helpful alternative. Instead of working with a snapshot of your compliance posture when preparing for audits, continuous compliance provides you with real-time insight into your control environment. This lets you identify risks early, respond faster, and build a solid security foundation.
In this article, we’ll examine continuous compliance, its growing importance, and how to implement it effectively at scale. You'll learn:
- What continuous compliance is
- Its importance and benefits
- Key components of a successful continuous compliance program
- Best practices for ongoing compliance
What is continuous compliance?
Continuous compliance is an ongoing process of ensuring that your policies and controls align with the applicable frameworks, standards, and regulations. It involves consistent monitoring of controls, systems, and personnel activity, allowing you to proactively detect vulnerabilities and signs of non-compliance as they arise.
To maintain continuous compliance efficiently, it's imperative to always stay on top of your compliance monitoring to review potential risks. While annual audits are required for many standards, many organizations typically prepare for them only when they're approaching, often relying on point-in-time data, which can result in overlooking emerging risks or compliance gaps.
Instead, ongoing compliance ensures you have access to your real-time compliance status at all times, which allows you to proactively identify and address issues before they impact your security posture.
{{cta_withimage3="/cta-blocks"}}
Components of an effective continuous compliance program
As you start planning your continuous compliance program, identify the processes you can automate to ensure smooth, ongoing operation. The key features your solution should offer include:
- Vulnerability management: Undetected vulnerabilities can expose your systems and data to risks. Automating monitoring within your compliance workflows ensures you can address issues before they escalate.
- Policy management: Creating, implementing, and managing policies is an integral part of managing compliance with industry-standard frameworks and regulations. With continuous cybersecurity compliance, you can establish a regular cadence with requirements and make policy reviews faster and more efficient.
- Vendor risk management: Managing vendor risk can be particularly challenging due to limited visibility into third-party security and compliance posture. Automating vendor contract monitoring ensures you can track commitments and quickly identify compliance gaps.
- Data management: This involves implementing security controls that maintain your data's privacy, integrity, and availability at all times.
- Risk management: As part of security risk and compliance monitoring, you need to stay vigilant against emerging threats and assess their potential impact on your business. This includes developing a comprehensive TPRM strategy to mitigate all risks.
- Incident management: Your continuous compliance program should include a strategic incident response plan. This involves developing practices, regularly monitoring for potential incidents, reviewing how you handle them, and updating the plan when necessary.
6 best practices for successful continuous compliance
To build a solid foundation for an effective continuous compliance program, you should follow these practices:
- Understand your compliance landscape
- Keep an inventory of your assets and third parties
- Schedule and perform routine policy and access reviews
- Implement solid data protection practices
- Develop an incident response plan
- Leverage compliance automation software
We’ll examine the importance of each of these and their role in your compliance program in the sections below.
1. Understand your compliance landscape
Before implementing continuous compliance practices, you should familiarize yourself with the relevant frameworks and regulations to determine which ones apply to your organization. This process should go beyond mandatory ones—identify voluntary industry-accepted standards to gain a competitive edge.
Each regulation and framework may require different workflows, controls, or reporting requirements. A thorough understanding of your compliance landscape will help you prioritize efforts and allocate resources effectively.
When defining your organization’s compliance obligations, consider these factors:
- Industry: The sector you operate in will prioritize different regulations. For example, healthcare companies must comply with HIPAA, while financial institutions often focus on SOC 2 or PCI DSS.
- Location: Mandatory regulations are often region-specific. For example, EU-based businesses need to adhere to GDPR and NIS 2, while Australian organizations will have to comply with the Essential Eight.
- Business goals: Your organization's future plans, objectives, and SLAs can impact compliance priorities. For example, if you intend to work with the American Department of Defense (DoD), you’ll have to get CMMC certified first.
{{cta_withimage24="/cta-blocks"}} | How to choose the right continuous compliance solution
2. Keep an inventory of your assets and third parties
“
"Security standards and regulations dictate the need to manage third-party risk in a formalized and effective manner. Implementing ongoing monitoring of your organization’s vendors is a key mechanism for effectively identifying and managing vendor risk.”
To implement effective continuous compliance monitoring, you’ll need a centralized inventory of all assets and third parties. This will serve as a single monitoring hub, helping you effectively track changes and evaluate systems and vendors against compliance standards.
Without a centralized view, monitoring becomes much more complex. Your teams will have to dig through disparate systems and siloed technologies, which slows response times and increases the risk of oversights.
Most standards require regularly reviewing your data, assets, and third-party relationships to maintain compliance. Centralizing your information is a large step toward streamlining and automating these processes, ensuring your information stays up to date and accurate.
Establishing a comprehensive inventory efficiently often requires leveraging a dedicated solution. While traditional methods like spreadsheets are helpful, they can’t support your efforts as effectively due to the dynamic nature of assets and third parties.
3. Schedule and perform routine policy reviews
Security compliance frameworks and standards aren’t a one-time effort. Regardless of the certification you’re pursuing, ensuring continuous compliance means you’ll have to perform regular or annual reviews to ensure your controls are up to date with the changes in the compliance landscape.
Reviews might involve workflows such as determining whether your policies meet performance criteria or assessing which procedures need to be updated to reflect regulatory updates.
How often you should review policies depends on several factors, such as:
- Regulatory obligations: Some frameworks, such as ISO 27001, prescribe assessments at planned intervals or after each update.
- Frequency and impact of recent security incidents: Perform comprehensive re-evaluations of your controls after each security incident, such as a data breach. These reviews help you accurately identify gaps and prevent similar issues from repeating.
- The complexity of your organization's security and compliance landscape: Review your policies after each change in your organization’s security posture, such as system updates and new vendor onboarding, to identify and address potential risks early.
4. Implement solid data protection practices
The core goal of most frameworks is to safeguard sensitive data. Whether you’re working with protected health information, financial records, or classified data, your policies and procedures should align with the requirements of applicable standards and regulations.
Achieving comprehensive protection means pursuing multiple frameworks, which can be complex and time- and resource-consuming. Many industry-accepted standards share common practices, so mapping controls across frameworks can help reduce duplicative work and improve efficiency.
To implement strong data protection practices, you'll need:
- Data classification and encryption: Classify sensitive information and ensure only authorized individuals can access it
- Security risk management practices: Identify potential risks, evaluate their impact on your operations, and then establish mitigation strategies
- Business continuity plans: Establish policies and procedures and roles and responsibilities that ensure that your organization can continue operating during situations such as breaches, outages, and natural disasters
Comprehensive security practices are particularly important for organizations in highly regulated industries like healthcare or finance. Standards such as HIPAA and PCI DSS have stringent requirements, and breaches can result in severe financial penalties, loss of contracts, or legal action.
5. Develop an incident response plan
Even with a comprehensive compliance and security program in place to prevent incidents, organizations still need a formal incident response plan (IRP).
There are two approaches to implementing an IRP:
- You can develop one internally and tailor it to your specific needs
- You can structure it according to applicable standards
For example, NIS 2 and HIPAA prescribe strict reporting timelines that you must adhere to. Your objective should be to establish a clearly defined process you can regularly test and refine.
A key aspect of an IRP is performing analyses after an incident occurs. Lessons learned can help you gain insight into what happened during the incident and how to prevent it from happening again.
6. Leverage compliance automation software
Securing continuous compliance manually is a time-consuming, complex process that can put significant pressure on your compliance and security team members. As part of ongoing compliance efforts, your teams often have to repeat labor-intensive tasks like:
- Evidence collection
- Documentation procedures
- Security reviews
- Internal compliance audits
In many cases, manual continual compliance strategies can be challenging to sustain over time. They often require considerable coordination, competent resources, and time, all of which drive up the cost of compliance.
However, automating compliance allows you to minimize these issues and reduce the pressure on your teams. By leveraging continuous compliance software for your daily operations, you can streamline some of the most repetitive tasks, allowing your teams to focus on more strategic objectives.
An effective continuous compliance automation solution should include these features:
- Continuous security and compliance gaps monitoring
- Real-time visibility via a unified platform
- Automated audit preparation
- A repository for security documents
- Guided risk management and alerts
- Automated vendor reviews
- Reporting on the overall compliance program
{{cta_withimage26=”/cta-blocks”}} | How to achieve continuous compliance with Vanta & AWS
Vanta: Your continuous compliance automation partner
Vanta is a compliance and trust management platform that streamlines continuous compliance implementation and monitoring, supporting your GRC efforts with automation that saves time and resources for your compliance and security teams
Vanta’s dedicated GRC product achieves this through various helpful features, including:
- Centralized risk management
- Automated gap assessments and evidence collection
- Granular customization options
- Real-time control monitoring
- More than 375 integrations with commonly used software
Schedule a custom demo to explore Vanta’s offer and see how its features can make your continuous compliance efforts more efficient.
{{cta_simple29="/cta-blocks"}} | GRC product page
Compliance
What is continuous compliance?
Looking to upgrade to continuous, automated GRC and get visibility across your entire program?
Most established industry frameworks require annual audits and assessments to ensure ongoing compliance. Usually, passing audits involves presenting information that reflects your compliance at a specific point in time. Although useful, relying on this data type carries the risk of not noticing incidents, violations, and compliance drift for months.
This is where continuous compliance comes in as a helpful alternative. Instead of working with a snapshot of your compliance posture when preparing for audits, continuous compliance provides you with real-time insight into your control environment. This lets you identify risks early, respond faster, and build a solid security foundation.
In this article, we’ll examine continuous compliance, its growing importance, and how to implement it effectively at scale. You'll learn:
- What continuous compliance is
- Its importance and benefits
- Key components of a successful continuous compliance program
- Best practices for ongoing compliance
What is continuous compliance?
Continuous compliance is an ongoing process of ensuring that your policies and controls align with the applicable frameworks, standards, and regulations. It involves consistent monitoring of controls, systems, and personnel activity, allowing you to proactively detect vulnerabilities and signs of non-compliance as they arise.
To maintain continuous compliance efficiently, it's imperative to always stay on top of your compliance monitoring to review potential risks. While annual audits are required for many standards, many organizations typically prepare for them only when they're approaching, often relying on point-in-time data, which can result in overlooking emerging risks or compliance gaps.
Instead, ongoing compliance ensures you have access to your real-time compliance status at all times, which allows you to proactively identify and address issues before they impact your security posture.
{{cta_withimage3="/cta-blocks"}}
Components of an effective continuous compliance program
As you start planning your continuous compliance program, identify the processes you can automate to ensure smooth, ongoing operation. The key features your solution should offer include:
- Vulnerability management: Undetected vulnerabilities can expose your systems and data to risks. Automating monitoring within your compliance workflows ensures you can address issues before they escalate.
- Policy management: Creating, implementing, and managing policies is an integral part of managing compliance with industry-standard frameworks and regulations. With continuous cybersecurity compliance, you can establish a regular cadence with requirements and make policy reviews faster and more efficient.
- Vendor risk management: Managing vendor risk can be particularly challenging due to limited visibility into third-party security and compliance posture. Automating vendor contract monitoring ensures you can track commitments and quickly identify compliance gaps.
- Data management: This involves implementing security controls that maintain your data's privacy, integrity, and availability at all times.
- Risk management: As part of security risk and compliance monitoring, you need to stay vigilant against emerging threats and assess their potential impact on your business. This includes developing a comprehensive TPRM strategy to mitigate all risks.
- Incident management: Your continuous compliance program should include a strategic incident response plan. This involves developing practices, regularly monitoring for potential incidents, reviewing how you handle them, and updating the plan when necessary.
6 best practices for successful continuous compliance
To build a solid foundation for an effective continuous compliance program, you should follow these practices:
- Understand your compliance landscape
- Keep an inventory of your assets and third parties
- Schedule and perform routine policy and access reviews
- Implement solid data protection practices
- Develop an incident response plan
- Leverage compliance automation software
We’ll examine the importance of each of these and their role in your compliance program in the sections below.
1. Understand your compliance landscape
Before implementing continuous compliance practices, you should familiarize yourself with the relevant frameworks and regulations to determine which ones apply to your organization. This process should go beyond mandatory ones—identify voluntary industry-accepted standards to gain a competitive edge.
Each regulation and framework may require different workflows, controls, or reporting requirements. A thorough understanding of your compliance landscape will help you prioritize efforts and allocate resources effectively.
When defining your organization’s compliance obligations, consider these factors:
- Industry: The sector you operate in will prioritize different regulations. For example, healthcare companies must comply with HIPAA, while financial institutions often focus on SOC 2 or PCI DSS.
- Location: Mandatory regulations are often region-specific. For example, EU-based businesses need to adhere to GDPR and NIS 2, while Australian organizations will have to comply with the Essential Eight.
- Business goals: Your organization's future plans, objectives, and SLAs can impact compliance priorities. For example, if you intend to work with the American Department of Defense (DoD), you’ll have to get CMMC certified first.
{{cta_withimage24="/cta-blocks"}} | How to choose the right continuous compliance solution
2. Keep an inventory of your assets and third parties
“
"Security standards and regulations dictate the need to manage third-party risk in a formalized and effective manner. Implementing ongoing monitoring of your organization’s vendors is a key mechanism for effectively identifying and managing vendor risk.”
To implement effective continuous compliance monitoring, you’ll need a centralized inventory of all assets and third parties. This will serve as a single monitoring hub, helping you effectively track changes and evaluate systems and vendors against compliance standards.
Without a centralized view, monitoring becomes much more complex. Your teams will have to dig through disparate systems and siloed technologies, which slows response times and increases the risk of oversights.
Most standards require regularly reviewing your data, assets, and third-party relationships to maintain compliance. Centralizing your information is a large step toward streamlining and automating these processes, ensuring your information stays up to date and accurate.
Establishing a comprehensive inventory efficiently often requires leveraging a dedicated solution. While traditional methods like spreadsheets are helpful, they can’t support your efforts as effectively due to the dynamic nature of assets and third parties.
3. Schedule and perform routine policy reviews
Security compliance frameworks and standards aren’t a one-time effort. Regardless of the certification you’re pursuing, ensuring continuous compliance means you’ll have to perform regular or annual reviews to ensure your controls are up to date with the changes in the compliance landscape.
Reviews might involve workflows such as determining whether your policies meet performance criteria or assessing which procedures need to be updated to reflect regulatory updates.
How often you should review policies depends on several factors, such as:
- Regulatory obligations: Some frameworks, such as ISO 27001, prescribe assessments at planned intervals or after each update.
- Frequency and impact of recent security incidents: Perform comprehensive re-evaluations of your controls after each security incident, such as a data breach. These reviews help you accurately identify gaps and prevent similar issues from repeating.
- The complexity of your organization's security and compliance landscape: Review your policies after each change in your organization’s security posture, such as system updates and new vendor onboarding, to identify and address potential risks early.
4. Implement solid data protection practices
The core goal of most frameworks is to safeguard sensitive data. Whether you’re working with protected health information, financial records, or classified data, your policies and procedures should align with the requirements of applicable standards and regulations.
Achieving comprehensive protection means pursuing multiple frameworks, which can be complex and time- and resource-consuming. Many industry-accepted standards share common practices, so mapping controls across frameworks can help reduce duplicative work and improve efficiency.
To implement strong data protection practices, you'll need:
- Data classification and encryption: Classify sensitive information and ensure only authorized individuals can access it
- Security risk management practices: Identify potential risks, evaluate their impact on your operations, and then establish mitigation strategies
- Business continuity plans: Establish policies and procedures and roles and responsibilities that ensure that your organization can continue operating during situations such as breaches, outages, and natural disasters
Comprehensive security practices are particularly important for organizations in highly regulated industries like healthcare or finance. Standards such as HIPAA and PCI DSS have stringent requirements, and breaches can result in severe financial penalties, loss of contracts, or legal action.
5. Develop an incident response plan
Even with a comprehensive compliance and security program in place to prevent incidents, organizations still need a formal incident response plan (IRP).
There are two approaches to implementing an IRP:
- You can develop one internally and tailor it to your specific needs
- You can structure it according to applicable standards
For example, NIS 2 and HIPAA prescribe strict reporting timelines that you must adhere to. Your objective should be to establish a clearly defined process you can regularly test and refine.
A key aspect of an IRP is performing analyses after an incident occurs. Lessons learned can help you gain insight into what happened during the incident and how to prevent it from happening again.
6. Leverage compliance automation software
Securing continuous compliance manually is a time-consuming, complex process that can put significant pressure on your compliance and security team members. As part of ongoing compliance efforts, your teams often have to repeat labor-intensive tasks like:
- Evidence collection
- Documentation procedures
- Security reviews
- Internal compliance audits
In many cases, manual continual compliance strategies can be challenging to sustain over time. They often require considerable coordination, competent resources, and time, all of which drive up the cost of compliance.
However, automating compliance allows you to minimize these issues and reduce the pressure on your teams. By leveraging continuous compliance software for your daily operations, you can streamline some of the most repetitive tasks, allowing your teams to focus on more strategic objectives.
An effective continuous compliance automation solution should include these features:
- Continuous security and compliance gaps monitoring
- Real-time visibility via a unified platform
- Automated audit preparation
- A repository for security documents
- Guided risk management and alerts
- Automated vendor reviews
- Reporting on the overall compliance program
{{cta_withimage26=”/cta-blocks”}} | How to achieve continuous compliance with Vanta & AWS
Vanta: Your continuous compliance automation partner
Vanta is a compliance and trust management platform that streamlines continuous compliance implementation and monitoring, supporting your GRC efforts with automation that saves time and resources for your compliance and security teams
Vanta’s dedicated GRC product achieves this through various helpful features, including:
- Centralized risk management
- Automated gap assessments and evidence collection
- Granular customization options
- Real-time control monitoring
- More than 375 integrations with commonly used software
Schedule a custom demo to explore Vanta’s offer and see how its features can make your continuous compliance efforts more efficient.
{{cta_simple29="/cta-blocks"}} | GRC 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
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