The Future of Compliance is Here: Automation, Intelligence, and a Shift to Proactive Security

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Written by Ruchi Khurana, Lead Product Manager, Google and Raj Krishnamurthy, CEO, ComplianceCow.

We all know that today’s regulatory landscape is constantly shifting. Organizations face an ever-growing web of compliance requirements, demanding meticulous adherence to complex rules and standards. Traditional methods of managing compliance involve manual processes and resourcing and scalability challenges. They are proving to be slow, error-prone, and ultimately, unsustainable. Expanding into new markets, fundamental technology shifts such as Cloud and Generative AI make them more difficult.

But the good news is, the traditional compliance mindset is changing and moving from reactive responses and passing audits to a proactive built-in security approach. This is not just about making the existing processes a little faster, but about a full transformation in how we think about compliance.

This transformation is built on four pillars: Automation, Compliance by Design, Shifting Left and Continuous Compliance.

1. The Power of Automation: From Manual Toil to Efficiency

Compliance automation isn’t just about replacing human effort. It’s about freeing up valuable resources from redundant or repetitive tasks, reducing the potential for human bias and error, and ensuring a consistent approach. Think of it as having a skilled, tireless assistant who never misses a detail. By leveraging technology to automate evidence collection for audits, control mappings from a regulatory framework, continuously monitoring controls for particular controls metrics , and to generate reports, we can fundamentally change the way organizations handle compliance. Imagine automatically generating compliance reports or even automating security awareness training, allowing teams to focus on higher-value strategic initiatives. There are several open source projects with CSA, NIST, CNCF, FINOS, MiTRE such as OSCAL, Vulcan, Open Security Compliance that can help you to get started with automating your compliance posture. You can also engage with the CSA working group on Continuous Assurance to explore tools for automation.

2. Compliance by Design: Building Security into the DNA of Your Organization

Compliance is about creating trust and transparency of your operations. It should not be an afterthought, something bolted on at the end of a project but needs to be woven directly into the system development lifecycle (SDLC). This “compliance by design” principle is about thinking about security and compliance from the very start – when requirements are defined. By integrating security controls into the very architecture of the system, we ensure that compliance is not just a checkmark, but a fundamental element of design. It is much easier to “build-in” compliance early in the lifecycle than to “test-out” compliance post-deployment. This not only ensures systems are built to be compliant, secure, and trustworthy from the ground up but also significantly reduces labor costs, dependency on other teams in the organization and compliance toil.

3. Shifting Left: Catching Issues Early for a better Risk Management Strategy

What if compliance were an API; one that can be designed by the Security/GRC teams, and executed on demand by Engineering, DevOps and Security. This allows us to embed Compliance Harness, just like our Security Harness in SecDevOps, during the build and the release process.

This means engaging developers, security teams, and compliance professionals from the outset and using tools like static and dynamic analysis to identify vulnerabilities early and publishing compliance gaps and findings in interoperable and machine consumable formats such as Open Cybersecurity Schema (OCSF). This approach not only prevents issues from becoming deeply entrenched but also fosters a shared responsibility for compliance, creating a culture where everyone is invested in ensuring a secure, compliant outcome. Shifting left also allows risk and compliance professionals to focus on more strategic work such as hunting and mitigating security risk, which will lead to the Convergence of Security and Compliance. When security and compliance efforts converge, the results are far more powerful.

4. Continuous Compliance and Assurance

Compliance need not be a straight line function that starts with evidence collection and ends with audits. It is an out-of-band process that can create a continuous feedback loop, providing enriched operations data back into Security and IT. However, this makes sense only if compliance is continuous and operates at the speed of business. In addition to automating evidence collection, controls testing and validation, organizations need to focus on automated remediation and response, wherever possible. Declarative models such as infrastructure as code and policy as code and emerging GitOps practices can help with remediating gaps without increasing the surface area of access to production systems. Continuous compliance can result in continuous learning, improving the overall security posture of the organization and providing increased confidence and assurance for auditors.

So where are we as an industry on this journey of transformation?

As an industry, we’ve laid the groundwork, understanding the basic requirements and experimenting with automation in controlled environments. We're comfortable with basic scripting and automating basic manual processes, like evidence gathering.

However, the journey is far from over. We’re still working on full end-to-end automation of the compliance lifecycle -from creating regulations or frameworks, to identifying their applicability to an organization, to controlling implementation, monitoring, testing, reporting and machine readable auditing - every step currently needs human oversight and may still need it in the near future. We’re still mastering complex maneuvers, like integrating AI for advanced risk prediction.

Yet, the excitement around potential benefits – faster audits, continuous compliance, and proactive risk management – is palpable. The goal is to achieve autonomous compliance where systems can learn and self-correct.

Where do we need to start?

To begin, organizations must first understand their current state and current risks – where they are now and what they have in place. Then, they need to define their automation goals, setting realistic expectations. It's not an overnight transition, but an iterative process with achievable goals. They can do this by understanding key risks and priorities, selecting the right tools for automation, starting small with pilot projects, building Minimum Viable Programs and continuously assessing impact, and refining and iterating through the process

What may be blocking us from navigating forward?

The Challenges: People, Processes, Technology, and Data

The transformation to automated compliance isn't without its hurdles. These challenges often stem from people, processes, technology, and data. Resistance to change, skill gaps, and fear of job displacement can hinder adoption. Organizations and leadership need to build a clear and collaborative approach to communication and training between various business units in order to implement a successful compliance transformation. They may be required to build an effective business case. The business case should look beyond obvious labor and cost savings with compliance and audits impacting the bottom line. They should look for opportunities that can positively impact revenue metrics as well. The effect of reducing the time to enter into new markets, acquiring new customers with industry and regulatory oversight, increasing the velocity of product releases or shortening the time to close deals are good examples for building the Total Economic Impact (TEI) and the Return on Investment (RoI) for the compliance automation program.

Another important element of the compliance landscape is data quality, which must be of top priority; ensure your manual processes and solutions have the right and vetted compliance data sets before implementing any automation.

By setting shared company-wide goals, such as reduced risk, enhanced customer trust, and improved security posture, organizations can leverage synergies and maximize the value of both security and compliance. Shared frameworks and processes ensure that the two areas work together to achieve maximum efficiency.

The Future: The Transformative Power of AI

AI is no longer a futuristic concept but a practical solution that revolutionizes compliance. In fact, AI has a major role to play in this future. Consider these examples where AI can revolutionize the compliance industry:

  1. Managing Controls Lifecycle: The increasing capabilities of Large Language Models allow us to automatically read policy documents, industry requirements and operating procedures, and anchor them to common controls framework. This can help with automatically managing controls lifecycle with minimum human input
  2. Compliance Analysis and Reporting: Imagine AI analyzing and interpreting complex regulatory updates in real-time, going beyond mere identification to extract actionable insights. Machine learning models can analyze regulations, map them to existing controls, and identify gaps and anomalies. Natural Language Processing can analyze documents to find potential compliance gaps before an audit.
  3. Continuous Controls Monitoring and Alerting: AI can enhance real-time monitoring of control performance data. When incidents are detected, systems can automatically alert relevant personnel, enabling prompt action. This helps mitigate risks proactively.
  4. AI for Control Enhancements and Auditing: The traditional auditing industry is due for a major evolution. AI can automate tasks such as controls monitoring, testing, data validation, and reconciliation. AI systems can create detailed audit trails and even aid in automated reported generation and answering audit questions.
  5. And the possibilities are endless.

We are stepping into an era where AI can do more than just improve efficiency; it can enhance our ability to predict, analyze, and proactively mitigate compliance risks. Ultimately, emerging tech allows us to build a future where compliance is not just a reactive measure, but a dynamic process that can adapt to the constantly changing landscape. It is an exciting time to be in the compliance space and embracing these changes will provide both increased efficiency, security, and peace of mind.

This future isn't just about avoiding penalties, fulfilling requirements, or doing blind check in the box audit activities. It’s about building trust, enhancing security, and fundamentally transforming the way organizations operate. The future of compliance isn’t just automated; it’s intelligent, proactive, and seamlessly integrated. It's a future where compliance isn't a burden, but a strategic advantage.


Continue exploring the future of compliance, automation innovation, and continuous assurance by checking out the Compliance Revolution Webinar Series.


About the Authors

Ruchi Khurana, Lead Product Manager, Google

Ruchi is a cybersecurity and compliance leader with progressive experience building and leading global, complex programs, products, solutions, teams, and strategies in cybersecurity, risk management, resilience, regulatory compliance, privacy, audit, assurance and AI Trust. She has initiated, developed, and implemented security programs that meet the needs of multiple regulated industries.

Ruchi currently leads Product Management within Google Cloud's CISO organization, spearheading the development of cutting edge security assurance, risk, privacy, audit, and compliance engineering products. Ruchi has also served as a security and compliance advisor to CxOs leading Google Cloud's partnership with many Fortune 500 customers and partners. Prior to joining Google, Ruchi has a wide array of experience in the field of cybersecurity spanning from Software Engineering, Cybersecurity & Privacy Consulting, and building and leading in-house GRC functions

Raj Krishnamurthy, CEO, ComplianceCow

Raj has 25+ years of experience with Software Development and Product Engineering, building enterprise grade software for cloud and data centers. He has focused for the last 10+ years in engineering Security, GRC and Trust systems. He is the CEO at ComplianceCow, a startup building an agentic Security GRC Middleware platform for continuous controls assurance. Raj also actively contributes code and effort to open source working groups such as CSA, CNCF and FINOS on security, policy and assurance.

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