Compliance audits tend to be comprehensive and demanding, which can be a constant source of overwhelm for compliance teams. They typically need to invest a significant amount of time to ensure their controls, policies, and procedures are aligned with the compliance framework. The stakes are even higher when non-compliance can lead to penalties or operational hiccups.
The good news is that compliance audits can be smooth sailing if you invest your resources toward audit readiness. In this guide, we’ll present:
- The key components to organizing a successful compliance audit
- A seven-step checklist that supports compliance audits at any scale
Why compliance audit readiness matters
Focusing on compliance readiness helps you avoid the most common challenges organizations face while being audited, such as:
- Last-minute assessments that lead to haphazard control reviews and adjustments
- Lack of thorough understanding of your compliance obligations or missing regulatory updates
- Missed documentation and disorganized evidence collection
- Overwhelmed compliance teams and affected departments that could disrupt regular operations
Sufficient preparedness is especially important if you’re pursuing compliance with mandatory regulations like GDPR and HIPAA. Considering the dominantly online environment most organizations operate in, such regulations scrutinize virtually every aspect of your operations and impose numerous data privacy and security rules.
An even bigger challenge is that many standards don’t come with clear prescriptive guidance. This makes interpretation and implementation challenging and prone to oversight due to guesswork, which might not be evident until the audit begins.
By giving your team enough time to prepare, you can proactively identify and remediate compliance gaps and complete audits efficiently. Being audit-ready also improves your reputation among stakeholders like clients, partners, regulatory bodies, and auditors.
{{cta_withimage22="/cta-modules"}} | The Audit ready checklist
5 components to a successful compliance audit
Regardless of what standard or regulation you’re being audited for, here are the five foundational components you need to get started:
- An experienced auditor: If you can choose your auditor, especially for an internal compliance audit, assess their niche competencies and experience with similar audits. Ideally, the auditor won’t only perform the necessary assessments but also guide you in filling the gaps uncovered during the process.
- Organization-wide buy-in: C-level executives must be on board with all the processes involved in the audit so they can approve the use of adequate resources. Their buy-in would help you involve team members across departments in reviews and assessments, leading to smoother audit workflows.
- Evidence management system: Your auditor will look for observed and documented evidence of your adherence to a regulation or standard’s requirements. Having a streamlined and accessible evidence collection system will ensure transparency during the audit.
- An auditor liaison team: The idea behind having a liaison team is to support the auditor with further clarification or evidence as necessary. You can assign specific task owners or experts your auditor can turn to for timely information.
- Compliance automation software: Compliance automation software is an essential part of preparing for compliance audits today. Such tools help organizations manage evidence and automate repetitive audit tasks like data collection, which may help reduce the cost and effort associated with audits.
Your 7-step compliance audit preparation checklist
Every compliance framework calls for a specific approach to preparation. You can use the following steps as a baseline checklist and then adapt it to your compliance needs:
- Understand the scope of the audit
- Draw a clear timeline
- Review your current compliance posture
- Allocate resources and team members effectively
- Implement the scoped changes
- Gather and manage evidence
- Build a collaborative relationship with your auditor
Let’s discuss the key action items for each step.
Step 1: Understand the scope of the audit
Audit preparation begins with the understanding of your chosen standard or regulation. Your compliance team must thoroughly examine all the applicable requirements and check for recent updates that you need to account for.
Besides the standard’s requirements, you need to understand the audit’s scope. Many times, the audit won’t encompass the entire organization but its specific components, such as:
- IT infrastructure
- Information management
- Risk management
- Finance and operations
Once you understand the components that will be audited, you can highlight the related systems, policies, and practices you’ll assess and adjust to pass the audit. If you’re undergoing a continuous compliance audit, you may also want to revisit previous audit reports and ensure you’ve implemented its recommended remedial measures (if any).
{{cta_withimage3="/cta-modules"}} | The ultimate guide to scaling compliance
Step 2: Draw a clear timeline
Most organizations don’t have all the necessary controls and evidence to pass the audit right away. That’s why it’s essential to draw up an audit timeline defining key milestones (such as controls testing and stakeholder reviews) beforehand. This is especially true for more comprehensive audits—like continuous compliance audits—that require evidence collected over a longer time frame.
You should also account for your chosen auditor’s availability. You might need to provide notice far in advance because reputable auditing firms are often booked ahead.
Finally, the statement of work (SOW) you’ll likely sign will contain various deadlines you need to meet for checkpoints like auditor arrival and executing remediation plans. The agreed-upon dates will guide the rest of the planning for your audit.
Step 3: Review your current compliance posture
Once you understand your compliance obligations and the audit’s scope, you need to estimate how far you are from complete compliance. You’ll need to perform a gap analysis to compare your current compliance posture to all the applicable requirements.
For instance, here are some of the key elements you’ll need to review during IT audits:
- Security posture
- Access to sensitive data and systems
- Data security and privacy policies and procedures
- Risk profile and management practices
-
Performing gap analysis before audits manually is not a viable practice anymore, especially if you have a large organization with an elaborate IT infrastructure and numerous connected third parties. To streamline the process, consider using an automated security and compliance solution that can present a gap analysis in real time.
Step 4: Allocate resources and team members effectively
Each compliance activity requires a specific amount of time and effort investment from your team. For example, a comprehensive security review will likely involve several IT and compliance professionals, and it might take weeks to complete. By contrast, a data privacy policy review might only take a day or two and can be done by one team member.
After outlining the activities you need to perform to bridge compliance gaps, map them to the corresponding teams and resources. Assign task owners to ensure accountability, and keep communication channels open to foster cross-department collaboration.
Step 5: Implement the scoped changes (or gap remediation)
Bridging compliance gaps can take some time, especially if your security program isn’t mature or you have to introduce comprehensive changes to your risk management program. You might need to perform various activities, such as:
- Introducing additional security controls
- Updating your policies
- Creating a risk management framework based on the assessment results
- Improving your documentation procedures
Depending on the amount of work scoped, gap remediation might be the most time-consuming stage of audit preparation. However, the scope of remediation is typically narrow if you’re preparing yourself for follow-up or interim audits to maintain compliance with existing standards or regulations.
It’s a good idea to keep the timeline from step two in mind while planning and allocating resources for gap remediation.
{{cta_withimage22="/cta-modules"}} | The Audit ready checklist
Step 6: Gather and manage evidence
The next step is to collect evidence of the existence and effectiveness of your updated controls, policies, and procedures. The type and amount of evidence you’ll need to collect depends on your chosen standard or regulation, so refer to the corresponding official resources to understand the nature of proof you must provide.
Some of the key evidence you’ll need includes:
- Risk assessments and mitigation plan
- Incident response plan
- Third-party SLAs
- Audit logs
- Business continuity plan
- Security testing reports
Evidence collection might be one of the more time-consuming processes as you get audit-ready, especially if you rely on disparate evidence collection via email chains, spreadsheets, and scattered documents. Your compliance team might lose time scouring different databases, which can slow down your preparation.
The best solution is to use a capable compliance platform that leverages automation to maintain a centralized depository of all the necessary controls, policies, and other compliance components. According to Vanta’s 2024 State of Trust Report, automation-enabled solutions helped organizations save 4.6 hours weekly on evidence collection only.
Step 7: Build a collaborative relationship with your auditor
While your auditor might have experience in a desired niche, they may still need some time to understand the nuances of your organization’s compliance posture. You need to work closely with them to help them navigate the audit scope and ensure they have accessibility to your evidence resources.
As your auditor examines the evidence you’ve provided, they’ll most likely spend some time at your organization (especially if on-site work is required). Make yourself available for any clarifications or additional action items, such as remediating an ineffective control. Other trust-building actions include:
- Adhering to committed timelines
- Maintaining transparency about potential compliance gaps
- Acknowledging and planning for remediation workflows if necessary
- Following regulation-specific protocols
Finally, you may want to maintain communication with your auditor if you’re planning to introduce changes to your GRC program, such as adding new policies or updating your tech stack, that can impact future audits. The idea is to get their perspective on the proposed changes and evaluate if anything can impact your compliance posture.
{{cta_testimonial1}} | Sitoo customer story
Maintain complete audit readiness with Vanta
If you need robust software to support your compliance audits, Vanta is your ideal solution. It’s a comprehensive trust management solution that can cut your preparation time by up to 50%.
With Vanta, you can make readiness assessments a part of your regular compliance workflows. The platform leverages automation and integration to enable continuous monitoring of your compliance posture. Its dedicated automated compliance product offers plenty of useful functionalities, including:
- Automated evidence collection supported by 375+ integrations
- Centralized documentation and tracking of relevant controls
- Support for over 35 major frameworks (HIPAA, SOC 2, HITRUST, and more)
- Real-time overview of your compliance posture through hourly tests
- Templates for streamlined policy creation
Vanta also offers a diverse partner network you can tap into to find reputable auditors and compliance professionals. The platform provides numerous other tailored solutions, such as a GRC suite and a public-facing Trust Center, to support virtually every aspect of your security and compliance program.
Schedule a custom demo to get a personalized walkthrough of Vanta’s automation solutions.
{{cta_simple29="/cta-modules"}} | Automated compliance product page
Compliance
How to prepare for a compliance audit: The ultimate checklist to follow
Compliance
Compliance audits tend to be comprehensive and demanding, which can be a constant source of overwhelm for compliance teams. They typically need to invest a significant amount of time to ensure their controls, policies, and procedures are aligned with the compliance framework. The stakes are even higher when non-compliance can lead to penalties or operational hiccups.
The good news is that compliance audits can be smooth sailing if you invest your resources toward audit readiness. In this guide, we’ll present:
- The key components to organizing a successful compliance audit
- A seven-step checklist that supports compliance audits at any scale
Why compliance audit readiness matters
Focusing on compliance readiness helps you avoid the most common challenges organizations face while being audited, such as:
- Last-minute assessments that lead to haphazard control reviews and adjustments
- Lack of thorough understanding of your compliance obligations or missing regulatory updates
- Missed documentation and disorganized evidence collection
- Overwhelmed compliance teams and affected departments that could disrupt regular operations
Sufficient preparedness is especially important if you’re pursuing compliance with mandatory regulations like GDPR and HIPAA. Considering the dominantly online environment most organizations operate in, such regulations scrutinize virtually every aspect of your operations and impose numerous data privacy and security rules.
An even bigger challenge is that many standards don’t come with clear prescriptive guidance. This makes interpretation and implementation challenging and prone to oversight due to guesswork, which might not be evident until the audit begins.
By giving your team enough time to prepare, you can proactively identify and remediate compliance gaps and complete audits efficiently. Being audit-ready also improves your reputation among stakeholders like clients, partners, regulatory bodies, and auditors.
{{cta_withimage22="/cta-modules"}} | The Audit ready checklist
5 components to a successful compliance audit
Regardless of what standard or regulation you’re being audited for, here are the five foundational components you need to get started:
- An experienced auditor: If you can choose your auditor, especially for an internal compliance audit, assess their niche competencies and experience with similar audits. Ideally, the auditor won’t only perform the necessary assessments but also guide you in filling the gaps uncovered during the process.
- Organization-wide buy-in: C-level executives must be on board with all the processes involved in the audit so they can approve the use of adequate resources. Their buy-in would help you involve team members across departments in reviews and assessments, leading to smoother audit workflows.
- Evidence management system: Your auditor will look for observed and documented evidence of your adherence to a regulation or standard’s requirements. Having a streamlined and accessible evidence collection system will ensure transparency during the audit.
- An auditor liaison team: The idea behind having a liaison team is to support the auditor with further clarification or evidence as necessary. You can assign specific task owners or experts your auditor can turn to for timely information.
- Compliance automation software: Compliance automation software is an essential part of preparing for compliance audits today. Such tools help organizations manage evidence and automate repetitive audit tasks like data collection, which may help reduce the cost and effort associated with audits.
Your 7-step compliance audit preparation checklist
Every compliance framework calls for a specific approach to preparation. You can use the following steps as a baseline checklist and then adapt it to your compliance needs:
- Understand the scope of the audit
- Draw a clear timeline
- Review your current compliance posture
- Allocate resources and team members effectively
- Implement the scoped changes
- Gather and manage evidence
- Build a collaborative relationship with your auditor
Let’s discuss the key action items for each step.
Step 1: Understand the scope of the audit
Audit preparation begins with the understanding of your chosen standard or regulation. Your compliance team must thoroughly examine all the applicable requirements and check for recent updates that you need to account for.
Besides the standard’s requirements, you need to understand the audit’s scope. Many times, the audit won’t encompass the entire organization but its specific components, such as:
- IT infrastructure
- Information management
- Risk management
- Finance and operations
Once you understand the components that will be audited, you can highlight the related systems, policies, and practices you’ll assess and adjust to pass the audit. If you’re undergoing a continuous compliance audit, you may also want to revisit previous audit reports and ensure you’ve implemented its recommended remedial measures (if any).
{{cta_withimage3="/cta-modules"}} | The ultimate guide to scaling compliance
Step 2: Draw a clear timeline
Most organizations don’t have all the necessary controls and evidence to pass the audit right away. That’s why it’s essential to draw up an audit timeline defining key milestones (such as controls testing and stakeholder reviews) beforehand. This is especially true for more comprehensive audits—like continuous compliance audits—that require evidence collected over a longer time frame.
You should also account for your chosen auditor’s availability. You might need to provide notice far in advance because reputable auditing firms are often booked ahead.
Finally, the statement of work (SOW) you’ll likely sign will contain various deadlines you need to meet for checkpoints like auditor arrival and executing remediation plans. The agreed-upon dates will guide the rest of the planning for your audit.
Step 3: Review your current compliance posture
Once you understand your compliance obligations and the audit’s scope, you need to estimate how far you are from complete compliance. You’ll need to perform a gap analysis to compare your current compliance posture to all the applicable requirements.
For instance, here are some of the key elements you’ll need to review during IT audits:
- Security posture
- Access to sensitive data and systems
- Data security and privacy policies and procedures
- Risk profile and management practices
-
Performing gap analysis before audits manually is not a viable practice anymore, especially if you have a large organization with an elaborate IT infrastructure and numerous connected third parties. To streamline the process, consider using an automated security and compliance solution that can present a gap analysis in real time.
Step 4: Allocate resources and team members effectively
Each compliance activity requires a specific amount of time and effort investment from your team. For example, a comprehensive security review will likely involve several IT and compliance professionals, and it might take weeks to complete. By contrast, a data privacy policy review might only take a day or two and can be done by one team member.
After outlining the activities you need to perform to bridge compliance gaps, map them to the corresponding teams and resources. Assign task owners to ensure accountability, and keep communication channels open to foster cross-department collaboration.
Step 5: Implement the scoped changes (or gap remediation)
Bridging compliance gaps can take some time, especially if your security program isn’t mature or you have to introduce comprehensive changes to your risk management program. You might need to perform various activities, such as:
- Introducing additional security controls
- Updating your policies
- Creating a risk management framework based on the assessment results
- Improving your documentation procedures
Depending on the amount of work scoped, gap remediation might be the most time-consuming stage of audit preparation. However, the scope of remediation is typically narrow if you’re preparing yourself for follow-up or interim audits to maintain compliance with existing standards or regulations.
It’s a good idea to keep the timeline from step two in mind while planning and allocating resources for gap remediation.
{{cta_withimage22="/cta-modules"}} | The Audit ready checklist
Step 6: Gather and manage evidence
The next step is to collect evidence of the existence and effectiveness of your updated controls, policies, and procedures. The type and amount of evidence you’ll need to collect depends on your chosen standard or regulation, so refer to the corresponding official resources to understand the nature of proof you must provide.
Some of the key evidence you’ll need includes:
- Risk assessments and mitigation plan
- Incident response plan
- Third-party SLAs
- Audit logs
- Business continuity plan
- Security testing reports
Evidence collection might be one of the more time-consuming processes as you get audit-ready, especially if you rely on disparate evidence collection via email chains, spreadsheets, and scattered documents. Your compliance team might lose time scouring different databases, which can slow down your preparation.
The best solution is to use a capable compliance platform that leverages automation to maintain a centralized depository of all the necessary controls, policies, and other compliance components. According to Vanta’s 2024 State of Trust Report, automation-enabled solutions helped organizations save 4.6 hours weekly on evidence collection only.
Step 7: Build a collaborative relationship with your auditor
While your auditor might have experience in a desired niche, they may still need some time to understand the nuances of your organization’s compliance posture. You need to work closely with them to help them navigate the audit scope and ensure they have accessibility to your evidence resources.
As your auditor examines the evidence you’ve provided, they’ll most likely spend some time at your organization (especially if on-site work is required). Make yourself available for any clarifications or additional action items, such as remediating an ineffective control. Other trust-building actions include:
- Adhering to committed timelines
- Maintaining transparency about potential compliance gaps
- Acknowledging and planning for remediation workflows if necessary
- Following regulation-specific protocols
Finally, you may want to maintain communication with your auditor if you’re planning to introduce changes to your GRC program, such as adding new policies or updating your tech stack, that can impact future audits. The idea is to get their perspective on the proposed changes and evaluate if anything can impact your compliance posture.
{{cta_testimonial1}} | Sitoo customer story
Maintain complete audit readiness with Vanta
If you need robust software to support your compliance audits, Vanta is your ideal solution. It’s a comprehensive trust management solution that can cut your preparation time by up to 50%.
With Vanta, you can make readiness assessments a part of your regular compliance workflows. The platform leverages automation and integration to enable continuous monitoring of your compliance posture. Its dedicated automated compliance product offers plenty of useful functionalities, including:
- Automated evidence collection supported by 375+ integrations
- Centralized documentation and tracking of relevant controls
- Support for over 35 major frameworks (HIPAA, SOC 2, HITRUST, and more)
- Real-time overview of your compliance posture through hourly tests
- Templates for streamlined policy creation
Vanta also offers a diverse partner network you can tap into to find reputable auditors and compliance professionals. The platform provides numerous other tailored solutions, such as a GRC suite and a public-facing Trust Center, to support virtually every aspect of your security and compliance program.
Schedule a custom demo to get a personalized walkthrough of Vanta’s automation solutions.
{{cta_simple29="/cta-modules"}} | Automated compliance product page
Instead of hiring two full-time consultants and spending a year on the process, we achieved compliance in just seven months, saving time and costs."
Manus Sparf, CISO | Sitoo
| 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). |
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