When it comes to compliance, the best way to achieve compliance readiness and sail through audits seamlessly is by utilizing automation. This is probably not the first time you have heard this, as automation, along with concepts like AI, machine learning, continuous compliance, and SaaS integrations, are the buzzwords of IT compliance today.
Compliance with frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA is a fundamental requirement for SaaS companies to establish trust with prospects and customers today. However, if the compliance process relies on manual evidence collection, there is a high likelihood of significant gaps in security, privacy protection, and other aspects of compliance.
Using technology, you can instead automate your compliance processes and ensure continuous compliance.
Explaining Continuous Compliance
Continuous compliance is crucial for passing audits, such as SOC 2 Type 2, which require more than point-in-time checks. It involves constant monitoring of SaaS services, data stores, and workstations to detect issues such as unauthorized access, missing tools (e.g., antivirus, password managers), or exposed confidential data.
Auditors validate continuous compliance through automated evidence collection, reviewing samples over time to confirm the proper implementation of controls. This level of security program automation ensures 24/7 visibility and supports full compliance readiness.
For instance, were all Q3 production releases of your SaaS application tested and approved? Did employees complete the training and confirm their adherence to the policy? With a compliance automation platform, these answers are easily verified.
Why Set Up Integrations to Automate Compliance?
Integrations enable a compliance automation platform to monitor cloud platform services and SaaS applications, such as AWS, Azure, GCP, GitHub, Jira, Google Workspace, and Jamf, and collect evidence for the auditor to verify.
Absent an automated mechanism of this kind, compliance teams must manually hunt for Jira tickets, take screenshots, run reports, and then painstakingly associate that evidence with the correct controls. Manuals are painful.
For automated monitoring to provide significant benefits, a compliance automation platform must, of course, offer integration with all the various cloud platforms and applications used by customers. In Akitra’s case, these integrations total over 95.
How do Integrations and Continuous Automated Monitoring Help Reduce the Compliance Overhead Burden?
Compliance has traditionally been a time-consuming process, requiring significant time, resources, and often substantial spending on outside consultants. Continuous monitoring and automated evidence collection via API integrations, however, lend themselves well to a computerized method. This type of automation typically greatly shortens the schedule for compliance readiness and audit, and requires fewer IT staff. The quality of compliance generally is also significantly improved, as automation ensures that monitoring and evidence gathering are completed consistently, accurately, and on schedule.
The result can be a significantly better ROI from compliance. Successful certification can be completed in weeks, not months, and the cost of outside vendors, such as security consultants and auditors, is typically reduced by well over 50% in most cases, compared to traditional manual compliance methods.
Akitra’s Andromeda Compliance Manages the Start-to-Finish Compliance Journey
With Akitra’s compliance automation platform, your organization benefits from automated evidence collection, continuous monitoring, and efficient task management, ensuring full compliance readiness.
- Automated Monitoring & Alerts: Akitra delivers 24/7 oversight, detects control gaps, sends alerts, and provides remediation playbooks, supporting the automation of security programs.
- Automated Evidence Collection: Collect and timestamp compliance data, such as access controls and encryption settings, from cloud services, which is crucial for audit trust.
- Compliance Project Management: Assign tasks, track ownership, and sync with your project tools through compliance integrations, streamlining collaboration and ensuring seamless workflow.
- Stakeholder Communication: Utilize Akitra’s built-in messaging to manage audit queries, issue resolution, and report distribution all within a single system.
- Policy Management: Access pre-built, customizable policies aligned with any framework, track reviews, and stay prepared with automated reminders.
Integrations Available on Akitra’s Compliance Platform
Akitra’s Andromeda Compliance platform integrates with a wide variety of services, including cloud storage, project management, communications, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, security, and business applications. Akitra’s Andromeda Compliance Platform supports 95+ integrations that work seamlessly with all the cloud platforms and SaaS services you’re already using. Akitra offers more integrations than any other vendor in the industry.
Check out this list of examples of some of these integrations.
Compliance Automation with Akitra!
Establishing trust is a crucial competitive differentiator when courting new SaaS businesses in today’s era of data breaches and compromised privacy. Customers and partners want assurances that their organizations are doing everything possible to prevent disclosing sensitive data and putting them at risk, and compliance certification fills that need.
Akitra offers an industry-leading, AI-powered Compliance Automation platform for SaaS companies. Akitra, with its expertise in technology solutions and compliance, is well-positioned to assist companies in navigating the complexities of ISO 42001 compliance. As this standard focuses on the responsible use of AI, Akitra can provide invaluable guidance in implementing the necessary frameworks and processes.
Using automated evidence collection and continuous monitoring, together with a full suite of customizable policies and controls as a compliance foundation, our compliance automation platform and services help our customers become compliance-ready for NIST’s 800-218 Secure Software Development Framework and other security standards, such as SOC 1, SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, ISO 27701, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, ISO 9001, ISO 13485, NIST CSF, NIST 800-53, NIST 800-171, FedRAMP, CCPA, CMMC, SOX ITGC, and more such as CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark, Australian ISM and Essential Eight etc. In addition, companies can use Akitra’s Risk Management product for overall risk management using quantitative methodologies such as Factorial Analysis of Information Risks (FAIR) and qualitative methods, including NIST-based for your company, Vulnerability Assessment and Pen Testing services, Trust Center, and AI-based Automated Questionnaire Response product to streamline and expedite security questionnaire response processes, delivering huge cost savings. Our compliance and security experts also provide customized guidance to navigate the end-to-end compliance process confidently. Last but not least, we have also developed a resource hub called Akitra Academy which provides easy-to-learn short video courses on security, compliance, and related topics of immense significance for today’s fast-growing companies.
The benefits of our solution include enormous savings in time, human resources, and cost savings, including discounted audit fees with our audit firm partners. Customers can achieve compliance certification fast and cost-effectively, stay continuously compliant as they grow, and become certified under additional frameworks from our single compliance automation platform.
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FAQ’s
How does Akitra support security program automation?
Akitra enables 24/7 compliance monitoring, integrates with project tools, and streamlines alerts, task assignment, and policy management, powering complete security program automation.
