You've deployed policies, checklists, and workflows to keep your IT assets compliant with internal standards and regulatory requirements. Yet, the next time you perform an audit, there are gaps everywhere.
Devices aren't configured properly. Access permissions have drifted. Controls aren't consistently applied across systems.
That's because most compliance failures aren't caused by missing policies. They're caused by broken or unenforced controls.
The traditional ways of enforcing compliance depend on manual checks, spreadsheets, and human effort that leave too much room for mistakes and exceptions that go unnoticed until it’s too late.
It’s why CIOs, CISOs, and IT leaders are exploring ways to automate compliance tasks and take a more proactive approach that replaces manual, crisis-driven audit cycles. Before you can do the same, you first need to change the way you govern your IT assets and establish a data foundation that supports continuous compliance automation.
Keep reading to learn:
- The problems that come with periodic, point-in-time compliance processes
- Where compliance controls break under manual IT asset management practices
- How automating IT asset compliance enforces controls across your entire landscape
The Problem with Periodic IT Asset Compliance Checks
Have you ever asked, “How often should I check IT asset compliance?” A quick search will tell you to perform a check quarterly or semi-annually. According to those results, you could even get away with once-a-year checks just to satisfy audit requirements.
Here's the honest truth that they don't tell you: IT asset compliance needs to be an ongoing, continuous process.
Here’s why.
Audit-Driven Compliance Creates Blind Spots
Audit-driven IT asset compliance means you only discover gaps when you manually pull point-in-time evidence.
Issues can go unresolved for weeks or months between audits, increasing the risk of noncompliance and security issues. If you’re lucky enough not to have a crisis before your next audit, when you finally discover the gaps, remediation will be costly and time-consuming.
Reactive Compliance is Expensive
When manual compliance leaves you lacking real-time visibility into your assets and without a way to continuously validate control enforcement, you can’t see what’s wrong until it’s too late. You’re reactive to problems, not proactive in preventing them.
As a result:
- Issues Surface Late and Pile Up: When you don't spot compliance gaps until you're deep in audit prep, you discover everything at once, so your team has to spend time on remediation, not prevention.
- Security Risks Increase in Quiet Periods: While your IT environment changes in the time between audits, manual compliance processes allow certain changes to go undetected, opening the door for costly data and security breaches.
- Inconsistencies Lead to Poor Control: Since manual control enforcement depends on individual people, teams, and processes, there’s a greater chance for assets’ access and configuration to go against your control policies–something your team will have to take more time resolving later.
- Manual Efforts Increase IT Burnout: When your team spends hours sorting through spreadsheets and reconciling asset compliance issues themselves, they become more frustrated and exhausted, risking expensive turnover.
We know what you're thinking: With all of the different regulatory and internal compliance audits your IT team has to keep up with, there's really not that much time for things to go wrong. Right?
Unfortunately, as long as you're still relying on manual, point-in-time compliance processes, there are plenty of chances for controls to slip.
Where Do IT Asset Controls Break?
Would it be superfluous for us to say “everywhere”? Enterprise IT asset landscapes are constantly changing: adding and removing assets, switching up user access, and introducing new software and tools.
If you're trying to keep track of every asset–and their relevant data points–using manual processes, there is no shortage of ways they can stray outside of compliance controls.
1. Lifecycle Changes
Some of the most high-risk moments for control failures happen as an asset transitions between lifecycle stages.
- Onboarding: You immediately introduce security and compliance risk if you don’t provision new users, software, or hardware correctly. Manual onboarding processes can lead to inconsistent configurations or access assignments, especially when communication issues exist between IT, security, and HR tools.
- In-Life Changes: As employees change roles, responsibilities, or teams, data related to access and permissions may not always reflect reality. Recording and reconciling these changes manually can lead to data drift and orphaned or excess access.
- Offboarding: Manual efforts that rely on email requests and spreadsheets can miss offboarding steps that result in open access points and improperly decommissioned assets as employees leave your business.
2. Shadow IT and Unmanaged Software
Even the most well-intentioned employees often install unapproved applications or use SaaS software that falls outside your IT team’s purview. Traditional compliance processes rarely catch these deviations until you’re in the middle of an audit.
3. Policy Drift
Drift occurs when your IT assets no longer align with compliance policies.
This can often happen because of:
- Ad hoc access changes
- Configuration updates made outside approved workflows
- Orphaned devices, users, or software
The longer drift goes undetected under manual compliance processes, the further those policies decay and increase risk.
4. Access Creep and Identity Gaps
As employees transition roles or are granted temporary privileges, they can slowly increase their user access rights. Manual tracking results in ongoing stale access that is often only uncovered when audits raise red flags.
5. System Siloes and Poor Asset Visibility
Most legacy tools weren’t designed to talk to each other or share information. When different compliance and security tools hold conflicting asset data, those inconsistencies break controls you worked so hard to put in place.
And, in case you were wondering…
CMDBs Can’t Deliver Continuous Compliance
Yes, even favored databases like your configuration management database (CMDB) can’t cut it when it comes to enabling continuous, automated IT asset compliance. There are two main reasons why.
1. Data Collection Doesn’t Support Control Enforcement
CMDBs are designed to store data, not validate information for accuracy or detect drift. As long as you lack a way to automatically ensure asset data is correct and immediately be alerted when it’s not, your CMDB is just another passive repository.
2. Continuous Compliance Requires Cross-System Asset Truth
CMDBs are static tools that require a lot of manual upkeep to ensure accuracy. To maintain a real source of truth, they need to take in, validate, and reconcile data from other systems within your IT asset management stack–something they’re not built to do.
Sure, you could assign someone to keep your CMDB and other systems updated, but with how complex your IT asset landscape is and how fast it changes, there’s not enough time in the world for any person to successfully maitain that data in real-time.
That’s where automation for continuous IT asset compliance comes in.
Automating Control Enforcements Across Your Entire IT Asset Infrastructure
Automation can enforce compliance across all types of IT assets, regulatory frameworks, and security tools, going well beyond simple visibility. You can automate a wide variety of tasks that support compliance requirements, such as:
Comprehensive Asset Inventories
Set the stage for effective compliance and control enforcement by automating asset inventory management.
Connect your existing IT and security tools to automatically collect, sync, and normalize data for a unified inventory of all hardware, software, cloud, and SaaS assets. Know the exact “who, what, where, when, and why” to comply with strict compliance requirements, like Special Economic Zone (SEZ) compliance.
Lifecycle Tracking
Reduce the gaps caused by manual spreadsheets and siloed systems. Automate lifecycle governance by using workflows that enforce controls during onboarding and offboarding.
These can include policies for:
- Reclaiming and reprovisioning assets
- Revoking licenses and access permissions
- Legal hold and retention
Policy Monitoring and Continuous Validation
Instead of constantly comparing compliance requirements against your IT assets, automate validation against SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA, and other regulatory standards. Build out workflows that detect and alert you to drift and non-compliant changesright when they occur .
Remediation Worfkflows
When you’re alerted to noncompliance issues, leverage workflows that automatically trigger remediation tasks across identity, endpoint, and security systems.
Instantly begin resolving issues related to:
- Misconfigured devices
- Expired certifications
- Unapproved software
- Excessive user access
Security Enforcements and Risk Reduction
Integrate compliance requirements with security controls such as patch management, encryption, endpoint protection, and access policies. Automatically remediate gaps to reduce operational and audit risk and provide continuous visibility into your security posture.
Audit Readiness and Regulatory Compliance
Generate real-time, audit-ready evidence of controls enforcement and automate reporting for SOC 2, NIST, GDPR, and other regulatory frameworks. Eliminate manual audit prep, and limit your risk of non-compliance or audit failure.
Automating all of these tasks to maintain continuous compliance begins with using the right IT asset management solution to establish a single source of truth to base all compliance and audit activity on.
How Oomnitza Enables Continuous Compliance through Automation
Compliance automation is only reliable when every system references the same asset truth. Oomnitza directly addresses the needs of enterprise IT and security teams and enables you to overcome the limitations of manual asset compliance tools and processes by delivering:
1. Unified Asset Management as a Foundation
Oomnitza centralizes your hardware, software, cloud and SaaS data across your existing tech stack to create a single system for tracking all your technology assets.
By connecting your IT, security, compliance, and HR systems via verified integrations, we ensure your asset data is validated and accurate for greater compliance control.
2. Automated Lifecycle Workflows that Enforce Controls
Our modern IT asset management platform uses policy-driven automations that support automated, compliant onboarding and offboarding. Built-in drift detection and policy monitoring operationalizes compliance and ensures your controls remain intact year-round.
You can use our no-or-low-code workflows to:
- Assess and adapt with requirements for internal and regulatory standards
- Automate audit reporting and evidence gathering
- Eliminate blind spots and reduce compliance gaps
- Stop manual, exhausting, and resource-intensive audit prep
From Agonizing Audit Prep to Always-On Assurance
Compliance processes break when control enforcement relies on manual methods and disconnected systems. As your assets change and you work to prevent policy decay and risk, continuous compliance requires more than visibility. It requires automation that enforces your controls across your entire asset landscape.
Oomnitza automates complete asset lifecycle tracking, policy monitoring and remediation workflows so your controls stay in place year-round, not just during audit times. With a unified source of asset truth, you can detect drift before it happens, reduce audit and compliance risk, and maintain continuous compliance without heavy manual efforts.
Are you ready to leverage unified IT asset management for automated control enforcement? Let’s talk about how you can get started with Oomnitza.