Written by Martin Davies, an Audit Alliance Manager at Drata
Automating governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) processes to streamline auditing is not new. For some time, many auditing firms have leveraged automation solutions – typically ones built in-house – to help automate workflows associated with assessing audit evidence and communicating with stakeholders.
GRC tools like these bring some level of efficiency to auditing. But on their own, they only go so far in bringing speed, efficiency, and risk reduction to complex auditing processes.
But by closing the gaps in traditional security and compliance automation, GRC tools can streamline workflows for organizations and their auditors in new and powerful ways. This article explains what a more modern approach to GRC automation looks like and how auditors can benefit from it.
The Basics of GRC Automation
Across virtually all industries and business types, audits are typically a complex and daunting process. They require the collection and analysis of vast troves of information. The primary challenge lies in navigating the intricate landscape of frameworks and standards. Auditors constantly grapple with deciphering framework requirements, ensuring they are provided the right evidence by their client organizations, and verifying that the evidence meets the standards set by the relevant frameworks. They also usually involve significant numbers of stakeholders, who must communicate over weeks or months to complete an audit.
In the past, auditing firms' efforts to streamline the auditing process using automation tooling focused largely on centralizing data collection and communication.
The Shortcomings of Security and Compliance Automation for Auditing
The efficiency that traditional GRC automation software offers typically ends with centralizing the requests and data collection. It overlooks other aspects of the auditing process that can be tedious, time-consuming, and prone to errors, such as:
Traditional solutions often require staff members to log into different systems or dig deep inside user interfaces to find data submitted by customers – because even if the data is stored in one central platform, that doesn't mean it's easy for auditors to locate all the data submitted in response to a large volume of requests.
The process of submitting data is typically manual on the customer's side. Automating the request doesn't translate to automating request fulfillment.
There is no way to confirm automatically that the data supplied by a customer aligns with what an auditor requested.
Data that customers submit often cannot be associated with a specific compliance requirement automatically. Auditors must generate these mappings manually.
As a result of shortcomings like these, conventional security and compliance automation solutions in the auditing industry fall short of truly minimizing the amount of time and manual effort – on the part of both auditors and customers – that is necessary to complete audits. They've also made it difficult to implement standardized approaches to automated auditing that work across multiple businesses, regardless of the types of compliance frameworks they need to support or the data they submit.
Ultimately, these challenges translate to higher costs and a higher level of risk for auditors. The more manual work necessary to complete an audit, the higher the staffing resources required and the greater the risk of errors due to human oversight.
Taking Auditing Automation to the Next Level
Fortunately, addressing these shortcomings is possible. The solution starts with implementing workflows that pull data from customers' "source of truth" systems automatically, rather than requiring manual fulfillment of every request. Although customers may need to supply some data manually, automation can dramatically reduce the time, effort, and risk associated with data collection.
From there, auditors can benefit from automation that streamlines the evidencing of core operational components of compliance frameworks. They can also map the data onto each customer's compliance requirements, eliminating the need for staff to locate data manually when assessing whether customers meet their requirements.
Taken together, GRC automation capabilities like these allow auditors to collect the information they need, associate it with relevant compliance requirements, and evaluate each customer's compliance status as quickly and efficiently as possible.
This is what next-level security and compliance automation looks like. It doesn't mean discarding traditional automation solutions; instead, it builds upon them by adding powerful new features that extend far beyond the automation of basic workflows like initiating requests. The result is more efficient and cost-effective processes for auditors, with the bonus of a smoother experience for customers.
About the Author
Martin Davies is an Audit Alliance Manager at Drata.
About the Author
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