Automated evidence collection for compliance: All you need to know

Organizations today are expected to maintain continuous compliance with evolving security standards and regulations, resulting in an enormous volume of evidence. Manually collecting and managing substantial evidence documentation is not practical when controls and scrutiny increase. The process is slow, error-prone, difficult to scale, and takes your team away from high-value security tasks.

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Several security teams consider automated evidence collection for easier and less stressful compliance management. In this guide, we’ll discuss:
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• How automated evidence collection can help you
• What types of data you can gather
• How to embed it into your daily operations

What is automated evidence collection?

Automated evidence collection uses technology such as integrations, APIs, and rule-based checks, sometimes supported by AI, to continuously gather, organize, and store documentation that supports compliance. Instead of relying on point-in-time checks or manual requests for screenshots or reports, data is collected directly from source systems to generate evidence as controls operate.

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These solutions are often embedded into compliance software so organizations can streamline evidence collection and readiness tasks into a single platform. They typically work by:
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• Integrating with your tech stack (e.g., infrastructure, ticketing, and code management platforms)
• Running preconfigured tests at a preset cadence
• Verifying that controls meet requirements
• Flagging gaps and failures that require attention

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The test findings and documentation are stored in a centralized repository, providing teams with easy access to near-real-time evidence. This speeds up response times to compliance gaps, resulting in smoother audits and continuous visibility into your compliance posture.

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Some solutions also offer features like 'pass by default' tests. These tests automatically pass when security configurations are integral to an integrated service and built-in by default by the service provider with no user configuration required. For example, if a cloud provider enforces encryption at rest for all storage by default with no ability to disable it, a test checking for encryption at rest could pass by default. This approach provides assurance without requiring ongoing monitoring of controls that cannot be misconfigured.

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What types of data does automated evidence collection gather?

You can collect automated evidence for almost any repeatable control, from access reviews and vulnerability scans to policy attestations and vendor risk assessments. The deciding factor is alignment: mapping automations to the right locations to demonstrate control effectiveness and improve your risk posture, instead of just recording actions.

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Depending on the tool you use and your needs, you can configure automated evidence software to collect:

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Note: The table is for reference only, as the data types collected can vary across software providers.

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Why automation matters for modern compliance

Many regulations and frameworks have complex requirements for ongoing monitoring and documentation. Managing this workload manually is overwhelming, and team-wide compliance and audit fatigue can become a real liability when operational workload increases. It raises the risk of human error, oversights, and delays, while your teams struggle to accommodate broader security tasks.

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Automation improves efficiency and reduces errors with standardized data collection, which allows for a more valuable reallocation of staff hours.

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Automated evidence collection is no longer a novelty—it’s table stakes for modern compliance teams who are being asked to do more with less. The real challenge isn’t deciding to automate, but pinpointing where your teams spend the most time proving they’re doing what they say.”

Evan Rowse

GRC Subject Matter Expert, Vanta

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LinkedIn

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Overly manual compliance workloads also mean weaker audit readiness and higher remediation efforts, which translate into tangible risks for leadership. Unaddressed compliance gaps can remain hidden in manual systems for a long time, increasing the risk of penalties and reputational damage.

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Automation ultimately makes modern-day compliance sustainable by drastically reducing your efforts for:
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• Demonstrable continuous compliance
• Proactive risk management actions
• Cost-effective scalability

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How automated evidence collection supports compliance?

Automated evidence collection can be used to support several compliance frameworks and regulations as a means of improving accuracy, consistency, and ongoing oversight. Most modern frameworks and regulations are technology-neutral but increasingly support the use of automation to improve accuracy, enable ongoing oversight, and reduce the manual burden of evidence collection for organizations, while also making evidence review more efficient for auditors and regulators.

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Here are some notable standards and regulations where automation helps support compliance:

Challenges of automating evidence collection

Automated evidence collection can present several notable challenges of its own:
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• Technical integrations: Implementing your evidence collection software requires connecting to various systems across your tech infrastructure, each with unique configuration requirements, APIs, and data structures. This can be a complex task that requires technical expertise and ongoing oversight, especially for systems that do not provide deep data and system interoperability.
• Managing the volume of data: Automation software can generate large amounts of reports, logs, and continuous monitoring output. Managing this data requires creating structured workflows, storage solutions, and dashboards that make evidence easy to access, interpret, and act on.
• Assigning accountability chains: Human oversight is necessary even with automated evidence collection. Teams need defined roles and ownership for managing alerts, responding to issues, and reviewing evidence. Without accountability, you increase the risk of missed findings, reducing the effectiveness of your solution.
• Data format consistency: Disparate systems may use different formats and naming conventions for documentation. Automation tools may collect this information, but you might need to convert it to a standardized format before it can be evaluated.
• Alert fatigue: Automation itself doesn’t lead to fatigue, but if every minor issue triggers alerts, it will quickly erode your team’s attention. Teams can get overwhelmed with information overload, making it difficult to prioritize. This can be fixed with an appropriate configuration.
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Automation should make audits easier, not create new audit targets. The moment you build your own compliance automation, that codebase becomes part of your risk surface, and you’ll need to validate and secure it like any other production system.

Evan Rowse, GRC SME | Vanta

‍Best practices for automated evidence collection

Here are some general best practices to integrate automated evidence collection into your workflows:
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• Plot out an optimized integration strategy: Identify all systems from which data can be collected to generate evidence, such as cloud providers, identity platforms, and version control systems, and map how each connects to your tool. Once you’ve connected your primary integrations, identify where the same control or requirement is assessed across multiple frameworks or audit reports. Then focus on controls requiring coordination across multiple people or teams to produce complete and consistent evidence. Every hour you save here is an hour your team can spend improving security rather than just proving it—that’s where the highest ROI for automation usually hides.
• Assign owners for monitoring automation: Designate stakeholders responsible for reviewing findings and responding to compliance issues. Create clear escalation paths to strengthen accountability and accelerate response times.
• Configure alerts to reduce noise: Configure your tool to filter and surface only issues that materially impact your risk posture or are necessary for a particular role.
• Provide ongoing training to stakeholders: Create training campaigns to ensure that both employees understand how the evidence collection software works, how to interpret alerts, and how to respond to findings.
• Review regularly to optimize automation: Evaluate your evidence collection solution periodically to identify gaps in coverage and monitor performance drifts, which are often caused by misconfigurations or unauthorized changes. Remediate issues before they result in compliance gaps or trust-diminishing incidents.

Vanta: Go-to automated evidence collection for compliance teams

Vanta is a leading agentic trust platform that automates workflows, evidence collection, and risk monitoring for 35+ industry-leading frameworks and regulations, including CMMC, SOC 2, ISO 27001, and the GDPR. With Vanta’s extensive automation resources, you can cut the time to compliance by more than half, saving significant resources in the process.

The platform’s compliance automation product offers features designed to force-multiply your team:
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• A centralized dashboard to track compliance
• Ongoing monitoring with real-time insights and alerts for faster remediation
• 1200+ hourly, automated tests across 400+ integrations to power automated evidence collection under categories such as:
  
  • Task management
  • Version control systems
  • Vulnerability scanners
  • Document management
  • Endpoint security
• Vanta AI Agent with context-aware suggestions, real-time insights, and proactive alerts 

Vanta also enables you to build on your existing foundation by cross-mapping control evidence across frameworks.

Book your custom demo to discuss your evidence collection needs with the Vanta team.