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Security reviews and internal compliance audits are essential to ensuring your organization’s security stays effective. But when performed infrequently—and relying on point-in-time snapshots—they leave space for compliance violations, control drift, and threats to go undetected for a long time.
An additional factor to consider is the ever-changing nature of the cybersecurity and regulatory landscapes. As new threats emerge, frameworks and regulations receive new updates to adapt to the expanding risks. Without real-time insight into your control environment, keeping up with these shifts becomes a challenge.
However, by implementing continuous control monitoring (CCM), you can monitor your controls ongoingly and ensure they stay up to date more efficiently. In this article, we’ll examine CCM and explore:
- What CCM is and how it works
- Why CCM is beneficial
- Which components a CCM system consists of
- How to set up CCM
What is continuous control monitoring?
CCM is the use of advanced technologies to monitor the existence and performance of your security, risk management, and compliance controls. It relies heavily on automation solutions that collect data from various sources to provide real-time (or near real-time) insights into your compliance and security posture.
The primary purpose of continuous control monitoring tools is to handle complex data analysis in the backend and provide relevant stakeholders with actionable data and suggestions for security and compliance improvements.
The need for CCM in cybersecurity arose from various challenges of traditional control monitoring, such as:
- Delayed detection of control failures and compliance breaches caused by point-in-time checks
- Loss of time and resources due to manual and complex processes, which leaves room for task fatigue, human error, and inconsistencies
- Inability to keep up with changes in the regulatory landscape
- Limited scope to track the volume and complexity of data that follows organizations expanding to new geographies, products, and technologies
CCM effectively resolves these issues, leveraging technology to help teams keep relevant information updated and accessible and maintain a firm grasp of all GRC controls.
{{cta_withimage26=”/cta-blocks”}} | How to achieve continuous compliance with Vanta & AWS
Continuous auditing vs. continuous monitoring
Although continuous auditing and monitoring are closely related, their target users and goals differ. Both rely on GRC automation to be effective, but continuous auditing is primarily aimed at internal auditors, while continuous monitoring serves other departments and high-level management.
Consult the table for an overview of the differences between the two:
While you don’t need to implement both systems for effectiveness, leveraging continuous monitoring alongside auditing can maximize value by improving coordination between departments and adapting more readily to regulatory changes.
Why is continuous control monitoring important?
CCM automation software matters because it supports your organization’s efforts to maintain security posture and continuously implement adequate security controls.
Like any form of automated GRC monitoring, CCM brings numerous benefits, most notably:
- Increased efficiency of compliance and audit processes: CCM significantly reduces the need for manual evidence gathering and documentation at regular intervals. With continuous security monitoring tools, you get a centralized repository for all data necessary for testing and monitoring controls, streamlining compliance and audit processes.
- Cost reduction: CCM provides visibility into inefficient processes and control deficiencies before they get out of hand, cutting remediation costs. It also helps achieve timely compliance and avoid the risk of penalties. Finally, since teams can monitor controls more efficiently, they can prioritize higher-impact projects.
- Better strategic and operational decision-making: Continuous control monitoring gives high-level stakeholders a comprehensive overview of the risks associated with strategic and operational decisions, ensuring clear, data-backed decision-making.
- Reduced risk of outages and data breaches: With continuous monitoring, you can proactively identify data and infrastructure vulnerabilities before they’re exploited and remediate them faster to fortify your organization’s security.
- Streamlined incident response efforts: CCM not only helps prevent incidents by catching issues early, but also improves your team’s ability to respond quickly and effectively when incidents occur, minimizing impact and downtime.
Key components of a continuous monitoring system
When choosing a continuous monitoring system, consider these main automated components:
- Data collection: CCM tools should collect relevant control information (e.g., vulnerability data, risk assessments, and access logs) with minimal or no manual input. Centralizing this data reduces human error, accelerates response time, and enables faster, more accurate analysis
- Data analysis: Your system must analyze collected information in real- or near-real-time to detect compliance gaps, risks, and oversights
- Responses: Continuous monitoring solutions launch preset responses, such as highlighting gaps, alerting relevant stakeholders, and initiating remediation workflows
- Reporting: Automated reporting consolidates your findings into a single dashboard and allows you to tailor reports to different goals, such as audits, leadership, or compliance, ensuring greater visibility into your processes
To maximize efficiency, ensure your CCM tools integrate well with your existing tech stack through robust software integrations.
{cta_withimage24="/cta-blocks"}} | How to choose the right continuous compliance solution
Common use cases of continuous control monitoring
CCM’s agile and responsive framework makes it useful for organizations in any industry. However, it’s particularly important in heavily regulated ones like healthcare, finance, and IT, where workflows evolve constantly and non-compliance can lead to severe financial penalties or legal action.
The four most prominent use cases of a CCM system are:
- Risk quantification and monitoring: CCM allows your organization to assess its risk posture on a more granular level. Automated configurations enable you to gather the data you need to quantify risks and monitor them continuously. When a control fails, pre-configured alerts allow you to remediate it quickly.
- Identification of control gaps and tracking performance: CCM streamlines tracking control gaps while eliminating laborious legwork. The consistent data availability allows for near-real-time reporting.
- Access management: Manual access reviews typically involve cross-referencing of human resource information system (HRIS) data with employee roles and permissions. With CCM, you can automate this process through continuous role-access validation.
- Change management: Continuous monitoring systems integrate with device management platforms to enable secure changes in hardware and other configurations. They also support efficient operation scaling when adopting new frameworks or undergoing ongoing audits.
How to set up continuous control monitoring
The exact process of implementing CCM into your operations will largely depend on your organization’s existing processes, risk exposure, and compliance requirements. However, it can generally be divided into five standard steps:
- Identify the key processes and controls
- Define control objectives
- Choose and integrate your monitoring software
- Set up automated tests
- Define KRIs and set up reporting workflows
The sections below will closely examine each step and the recommended methods for performing it.
Step 1: Identify the key processes and controls
Continuous monitoring doesn’t yield the same benefits to all processes. Not every process can be fully automated, so you need to identify the most impactful and automation-friendly processes and their corresponding controls.
One way to do it is to pull historical data from previous internal audits, control breakdowns, and self-assessments. You can then combine your findings with the controls from established frameworks, such as:
After you have your list of controls, you need to define clear priorities. You can use various criteria to do so—for instance, you may decide it’s worth implementing CCM for controls with:
- High risk scores calculated based on risk assessments
- Complicated sub-processes that can lead to human error
- Abundant data availability from the tools used to implement that control
Due to all these considerations, this step can be time- and resource-intensive. Still, it’s crucial to give it the attention it deserves to lay the groundwork for effective CCM implementation.
Step 2: Define control objectives
Control objectives outline the primary function of your controls and serve as reference points for measuring performance. As with controls themselves, objectives can be based on internal data and specific frameworks.
For the former, you need to ensure your control objectives align with your overarching business objectives. It pays to factor in your risk appetite, as one of the primary purposes of your controls is to mitigate risks.
As you expand your scope, focus on compliance with relevant frameworks when defining objectives. For example, if you’re working with ISO 27017 to protect your cloud infrastructure, your security control objectives may be to:
- Ensure the availability of cloud services
- Remove customer assets when a cloud service is terminated
- Align virtual and physical cloud networks
The goal is to establish a baseline structure for CCM relationships. For example, X control is supposed to work for Y objective, which may streamline configurations.
Step 3: Choose and integrate your monitoring software
Your choice of software will greatly impact the effectiveness of your CCM strategy. The requirements for continuous control monitoring in healthcare are different from those in banking, and the right solution will make your efforts significantly more efficient.
A capable CCM tool should offer:
- Control dashboards for a centralized overview of your control environment
- Asset inventory to effectively track systems, users, and information related to each control
- Real-time alerts so your teams can quickly be notified of non-compliance, control drift, and risks
Depending on your compliance environment and existing tech stack, you may need more than one software solution. If so, ensure that they are properly integrated so you avoid siloed technologies and resulting inefficiencies.
{{cta_withimage26=”/cta-blocks”}} | How to achieve continuous compliance with Vanta & AWS
Step 4: Set up automated tests
Automated tests are the essence of continuous controls monitoring, and you can start implementing them after mapping out your critical controls and objectives. These tests are typically conducted in the pass/fail format, outlining what happens if a control objective isn’t met.
You can carry out various types of tests, such as:
- Asset management queries
- Security posture checks
- Policy adoption status
- Onboarding/offboarding task progress
- Security setting configuration checks
- Observational tests
The specific tests you’ll implement mainly depend on your processes and controls. For example, you can test cybersecurity controls using asset management queries. If one of your controls is to ensure all assets are protected by encryption, you can use queries to assess what percentage of assets are protected within a given timeframe.
When setting up automated tests, you shouldn’t disregard testing frequency. Remember that continuous compliance and security are among the key purposes of CCM, so your test should run frequently, preferably at hourly intervals, to serve your GRC program needs.
“
It’s recommended that automated tests run at least daily, with hourly or real-time being most ideal.”
Step 5: Define KRIs and set up reporting workflows
The final step of CCM implementation is to track your control performance. You’ll do this through key risk indicators (KRIs) and other metrics, which should alert you to any control deficiencies and enable you to take timely corrective action.
When defining KRIs, make sure they meet the following criteria:
- Alignment with controls and objectives
- Specificity and focus on a clear signal
- Sensitivity and timeliness that enable early warning signals
- Quantifiability to ensure precision
After outlining KRIs, set up a system for managing alerts and addressing control weaknesses. Develop remediation plans beforehand—or leverage those provided by your CCM tool—so that you can react proactively to any potential deficiencies uncovered. The key to a good CCM ecosystem is ensuring good processes that can swiftly address non-compliance.
Streamline continuous control monitoring with Vanta
Vanta is a comprehensive trust and compliance management platform that supports key aspects of continuous monitoring. Its end-to-end, automation- and AI-enabled GRC suite helps streamline both risk management and control monitoring with features like:
- 375+ integrations with popular solutions
- 1,200+ automated hourly tests
- Automated gap assessments
- Support for over 35 industry-leading frameworks
- Centralized documentation collection and control tracking
- Templates for streamlined policy creation
- Extensive customization
Vanta’s platform offers additional helpful features, such as cross-mapping, which can eliminate duplicative work and enable you to reach compliance with multiple frameworks more quickly and efficiently.
Schedule a custom demo to explore how Vanta can support your CCM strategy.
{{cta_simple29="/cta-blocks"}} | GRC product page
FAQs
What is CCM in GRC?
CCM in GRC is the use of automation to continuously validate the status and effectiveness of your compliance procedures and controls across all levels of your organization.
What is a continuous monitoring strategy?
A continuous monitoring strategy is a structured approach to CCM that outlines the procedures for identifying, flagging, and remediating vulnerabilities and areas of non-compliance.
Why is continuous monitoring of controls important?
Continuous monitoring provides real-time insights into your compliance status, allowing you to react quickly to security gaps, operational issues, and regulatory changes.
Continuous control monitoring
Everything you should know about continuous control monitoring (CCM)
Continuous control monitoring
Looking to upgrade to continuous, automated GRC and get visibility across your entire program?
Security reviews and internal compliance audits are essential to ensuring your organization’s security stays effective. But when performed infrequently—and relying on point-in-time snapshots—they leave space for compliance violations, control drift, and threats to go undetected for a long time.
An additional factor to consider is the ever-changing nature of the cybersecurity and regulatory landscapes. As new threats emerge, frameworks and regulations receive new updates to adapt to the expanding risks. Without real-time insight into your control environment, keeping up with these shifts becomes a challenge.
However, by implementing continuous control monitoring (CCM), you can monitor your controls ongoingly and ensure they stay up to date more efficiently. In this article, we’ll examine CCM and explore:
- What CCM is and how it works
- Why CCM is beneficial
- Which components a CCM system consists of
- How to set up CCM
What is continuous control monitoring?
CCM is the use of advanced technologies to monitor the existence and performance of your security, risk management, and compliance controls. It relies heavily on automation solutions that collect data from various sources to provide real-time (or near real-time) insights into your compliance and security posture.
The primary purpose of continuous control monitoring tools is to handle complex data analysis in the backend and provide relevant stakeholders with actionable data and suggestions for security and compliance improvements.
The need for CCM in cybersecurity arose from various challenges of traditional control monitoring, such as:
- Delayed detection of control failures and compliance breaches caused by point-in-time checks
- Loss of time and resources due to manual and complex processes, which leaves room for task fatigue, human error, and inconsistencies
- Inability to keep up with changes in the regulatory landscape
- Limited scope to track the volume and complexity of data that follows organizations expanding to new geographies, products, and technologies
CCM effectively resolves these issues, leveraging technology to help teams keep relevant information updated and accessible and maintain a firm grasp of all GRC controls.
{{cta_withimage26=”/cta-blocks”}} | How to achieve continuous compliance with Vanta & AWS
Continuous auditing vs. continuous monitoring
Although continuous auditing and monitoring are closely related, their target users and goals differ. Both rely on GRC automation to be effective, but continuous auditing is primarily aimed at internal auditors, while continuous monitoring serves other departments and high-level management.
Consult the table for an overview of the differences between the two:
While you don’t need to implement both systems for effectiveness, leveraging continuous monitoring alongside auditing can maximize value by improving coordination between departments and adapting more readily to regulatory changes.
Why is continuous control monitoring important?
CCM automation software matters because it supports your organization’s efforts to maintain security posture and continuously implement adequate security controls.
Like any form of automated GRC monitoring, CCM brings numerous benefits, most notably:
- Increased efficiency of compliance and audit processes: CCM significantly reduces the need for manual evidence gathering and documentation at regular intervals. With continuous security monitoring tools, you get a centralized repository for all data necessary for testing and monitoring controls, streamlining compliance and audit processes.
- Cost reduction: CCM provides visibility into inefficient processes and control deficiencies before they get out of hand, cutting remediation costs. It also helps achieve timely compliance and avoid the risk of penalties. Finally, since teams can monitor controls more efficiently, they can prioritize higher-impact projects.
- Better strategic and operational decision-making: Continuous control monitoring gives high-level stakeholders a comprehensive overview of the risks associated with strategic and operational decisions, ensuring clear, data-backed decision-making.
- Reduced risk of outages and data breaches: With continuous monitoring, you can proactively identify data and infrastructure vulnerabilities before they’re exploited and remediate them faster to fortify your organization’s security.
- Streamlined incident response efforts: CCM not only helps prevent incidents by catching issues early, but also improves your team’s ability to respond quickly and effectively when incidents occur, minimizing impact and downtime.
Key components of a continuous monitoring system
When choosing a continuous monitoring system, consider these main automated components:
- Data collection: CCM tools should collect relevant control information (e.g., vulnerability data, risk assessments, and access logs) with minimal or no manual input. Centralizing this data reduces human error, accelerates response time, and enables faster, more accurate analysis
- Data analysis: Your system must analyze collected information in real- or near-real-time to detect compliance gaps, risks, and oversights
- Responses: Continuous monitoring solutions launch preset responses, such as highlighting gaps, alerting relevant stakeholders, and initiating remediation workflows
- Reporting: Automated reporting consolidates your findings into a single dashboard and allows you to tailor reports to different goals, such as audits, leadership, or compliance, ensuring greater visibility into your processes
To maximize efficiency, ensure your CCM tools integrate well with your existing tech stack through robust software integrations.
{cta_withimage24="/cta-blocks"}} | How to choose the right continuous compliance solution
Common use cases of continuous control monitoring
CCM’s agile and responsive framework makes it useful for organizations in any industry. However, it’s particularly important in heavily regulated ones like healthcare, finance, and IT, where workflows evolve constantly and non-compliance can lead to severe financial penalties or legal action.
The four most prominent use cases of a CCM system are:
- Risk quantification and monitoring: CCM allows your organization to assess its risk posture on a more granular level. Automated configurations enable you to gather the data you need to quantify risks and monitor them continuously. When a control fails, pre-configured alerts allow you to remediate it quickly.
- Identification of control gaps and tracking performance: CCM streamlines tracking control gaps while eliminating laborious legwork. The consistent data availability allows for near-real-time reporting.
- Access management: Manual access reviews typically involve cross-referencing of human resource information system (HRIS) data with employee roles and permissions. With CCM, you can automate this process through continuous role-access validation.
- Change management: Continuous monitoring systems integrate with device management platforms to enable secure changes in hardware and other configurations. They also support efficient operation scaling when adopting new frameworks or undergoing ongoing audits.
How to set up continuous control monitoring
The exact process of implementing CCM into your operations will largely depend on your organization’s existing processes, risk exposure, and compliance requirements. However, it can generally be divided into five standard steps:
- Identify the key processes and controls
- Define control objectives
- Choose and integrate your monitoring software
- Set up automated tests
- Define KRIs and set up reporting workflows
The sections below will closely examine each step and the recommended methods for performing it.
Step 1: Identify the key processes and controls
Continuous monitoring doesn’t yield the same benefits to all processes. Not every process can be fully automated, so you need to identify the most impactful and automation-friendly processes and their corresponding controls.
One way to do it is to pull historical data from previous internal audits, control breakdowns, and self-assessments. You can then combine your findings with the controls from established frameworks, such as:
After you have your list of controls, you need to define clear priorities. You can use various criteria to do so—for instance, you may decide it’s worth implementing CCM for controls with:
- High risk scores calculated based on risk assessments
- Complicated sub-processes that can lead to human error
- Abundant data availability from the tools used to implement that control
Due to all these considerations, this step can be time- and resource-intensive. Still, it’s crucial to give it the attention it deserves to lay the groundwork for effective CCM implementation.
Step 2: Define control objectives
Control objectives outline the primary function of your controls and serve as reference points for measuring performance. As with controls themselves, objectives can be based on internal data and specific frameworks.
For the former, you need to ensure your control objectives align with your overarching business objectives. It pays to factor in your risk appetite, as one of the primary purposes of your controls is to mitigate risks.
As you expand your scope, focus on compliance with relevant frameworks when defining objectives. For example, if you’re working with ISO 27017 to protect your cloud infrastructure, your security control objectives may be to:
- Ensure the availability of cloud services
- Remove customer assets when a cloud service is terminated
- Align virtual and physical cloud networks
The goal is to establish a baseline structure for CCM relationships. For example, X control is supposed to work for Y objective, which may streamline configurations.
Step 3: Choose and integrate your monitoring software
Your choice of software will greatly impact the effectiveness of your CCM strategy. The requirements for continuous control monitoring in healthcare are different from those in banking, and the right solution will make your efforts significantly more efficient.
A capable CCM tool should offer:
- Control dashboards for a centralized overview of your control environment
- Asset inventory to effectively track systems, users, and information related to each control
- Real-time alerts so your teams can quickly be notified of non-compliance, control drift, and risks
Depending on your compliance environment and existing tech stack, you may need more than one software solution. If so, ensure that they are properly integrated so you avoid siloed technologies and resulting inefficiencies.
{{cta_withimage26=”/cta-blocks”}} | How to achieve continuous compliance with Vanta & AWS
Step 4: Set up automated tests
Automated tests are the essence of continuous controls monitoring, and you can start implementing them after mapping out your critical controls and objectives. These tests are typically conducted in the pass/fail format, outlining what happens if a control objective isn’t met.
You can carry out various types of tests, such as:
- Asset management queries
- Security posture checks
- Policy adoption status
- Onboarding/offboarding task progress
- Security setting configuration checks
- Observational tests
The specific tests you’ll implement mainly depend on your processes and controls. For example, you can test cybersecurity controls using asset management queries. If one of your controls is to ensure all assets are protected by encryption, you can use queries to assess what percentage of assets are protected within a given timeframe.
When setting up automated tests, you shouldn’t disregard testing frequency. Remember that continuous compliance and security are among the key purposes of CCM, so your test should run frequently, preferably at hourly intervals, to serve your GRC program needs.
“
It’s recommended that automated tests run at least daily, with hourly or real-time being most ideal.”
Step 5: Define KRIs and set up reporting workflows
The final step of CCM implementation is to track your control performance. You’ll do this through key risk indicators (KRIs) and other metrics, which should alert you to any control deficiencies and enable you to take timely corrective action.
When defining KRIs, make sure they meet the following criteria:
- Alignment with controls and objectives
- Specificity and focus on a clear signal
- Sensitivity and timeliness that enable early warning signals
- Quantifiability to ensure precision
After outlining KRIs, set up a system for managing alerts and addressing control weaknesses. Develop remediation plans beforehand—or leverage those provided by your CCM tool—so that you can react proactively to any potential deficiencies uncovered. The key to a good CCM ecosystem is ensuring good processes that can swiftly address non-compliance.
Streamline continuous control monitoring with Vanta
Vanta is a comprehensive trust and compliance management platform that supports key aspects of continuous monitoring. Its end-to-end, automation- and AI-enabled GRC suite helps streamline both risk management and control monitoring with features like:
- 375+ integrations with popular solutions
- 1,200+ automated hourly tests
- Automated gap assessments
- Support for over 35 industry-leading frameworks
- Centralized documentation collection and control tracking
- Templates for streamlined policy creation
- Extensive customization
Vanta’s platform offers additional helpful features, such as cross-mapping, which can eliminate duplicative work and enable you to reach compliance with multiple frameworks more quickly and efficiently.
Schedule a custom demo to explore how Vanta can support your CCM strategy.
{{cta_simple29="/cta-blocks"}} | GRC product page
FAQs
What is CCM in GRC?
CCM in GRC is the use of automation to continuously validate the status and effectiveness of your compliance procedures and controls across all levels of your organization.
What is a continuous monitoring strategy?
A continuous monitoring strategy is a structured approach to CCM that outlines the procedures for identifying, flagging, and remediating vulnerabilities and areas of non-compliance.
Why is continuous monitoring of controls important?
Continuous monitoring provides real-time insights into your compliance status, allowing you to react quickly to security gaps, operational issues, and regulatory changes.
| 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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