Proving compliance tends to be a vicious cycle for enterprise IT teams.
They receive word of a compliance audit. IT starts pulling data from their CMDB and gathering spreadsheets, while compliance and security teams pull reports from their own systems. Both teams spend weeks stressfully reconciling actual asset activity with the data in front of them. After an exhausting effort, the data gets submitted to auditors, and teams cross their fingers that they pass. Then a short while later…
They receive word of an audit. IT starts pulling data…You see where this is going?
Audits continue to be a fire drill, sending IT, security, and compliance teams into a frenzy from the moment they get that first notice.
It’s not because teams lack policies and documentation that aim to support compliance. It’s because they treat audits like episodic events, rather than something to be ready for year-round.
Continuous compliance monitoring solves that problem.
Keep reading to see:
- Why point-in-time compliance checks don’t and can’t work
- The ways unified asset data provides a foundational layer for defensible compliance
- How continuous compliance monitoring prevents compliance and audit fire drills
The Top Four Reasons for Compliance Fire Drills
Let’s start out by stating the obvious: point-in-time compliance checks are built for an on-site, legacy-only world that no longer exists.
You have hundreds of users and devices and thousands of asset details to keep track of. Your employees use dozens of SaaS and cloud tools, and security threats are coming in droves from every direction.
It’s a lot to manage, much less prove you’re protecting. If you’re relying on point-in-time compliance checks, you’re bound to spend every audit cycle panicked, overwhelmed, and scrambling for missing or inaccurate data.
Here’s why:
1. Asset Details Change Every Day
Not a day goes by when something or someone isn’t moving within your IT landscape. There’s:
- Onboarding and Offboarding: People join, leave, and move within your organization on a daily or weekly basis
- Asset Ownership: Devices are reassigned, shipped to individual users’ homes, and replaced constantly
- License Access: IT grants SaaS permissions that never get revisited or decommissioned
- IT Drift: Endpoints and cloud configurations drift as teams update settings, install new software, or bypass standard procedures
Traditional compliance processes assume that everything is static, that none of these changes are happening. However, compliance is dynamic, and controls need to be accounted for (and supported by) continuous monitoring of assets in real-time.
2. Compliance Snapshots Capture Moments, Not Reality
Typically, gathering compliance audit evidence means pulling a sample of data from a specific date or period. Unfortunately, this data only shows you the assets’ owners, access, and configurations at that moment. On top of that, the data you pull from one tool can contradict the data living in another, since most systems don’t talk to each other.
As a result, you can miss:
- Accounts that are still active months after offboarding
- Devices that fall out of compliance between snapshots
- Licenses that have more than the contracted users
Even if you’re performing internal compliance checks between audits, they don’t prove your controls are always working. They can make you believe you’re compliant until an audit cycle reveals the truth of things that have fallen between the cracks. And so begins the fire drill.
3. Manual Checks Create a False Sense of Audit Readiness
Admit it: When it comes time to prove compliance, you’ve headed straight for:
- Spreadsheets exported from multiple systems
- Point-in-time reports of endpoint, identity, or CMDB data
- Email threads to screenshot approvals
The problem with all of those methods is that they assume that data is accurate and up-to-date. On the contrary, there’s plenty of room for human error as well as lags and disconnects between systems that leave you vulnerable to hidden compliance gaps that you don’t uncover until you’re in the middle of an audit.
4. Data Drift Makes Everything Worse Over Time
Data drift occurs when the reality of your IT assets strays further from the policies that govern them.
Even the most well-intentioned IT teams find themselves struggling with drift as exceptions and workarounds are made, such as:
- A contractor gets temporary access to your systems, but it’s never revoked once their term ends
- An emergency device provisioning bypasses normal approvals for the sake of time
- Teams install non-IT-approved SaaS tools that never make it into IT’s purview
While drift starts small, it builds over time across disconnected systems.
Suddenly, you’re scouring your systems to answer an auditor’s follow-up questions about why certain devices have active users when those people aren’t in your HR system and why your endpoint tools show all devices are accounted for, but there are 35 phones not managed or patched within your system.
Data drift often remains invisible because:
- Compliance, endpoint, security, and IT asset management (ITAM) tools leave hardware, software, SaaS, and cloud data siloed from each other
- Manual efforts can’t keep up with how fast assets change
- Traditional security tools aren’t designed to detect drift
If you’re going to move past these issues and actually build a system that maintains compliance year-round, you’ll first need to address the data problem.
Continuous Compliance Monitoring Hinges on Unified Asset Data
Compliance efforts break when auditors and vendors can debate your data.
Security, compliance, and IT teams all use different tools to govern IT assets, meaning the reports they pull can all contain different data. Conflicting data means you spend more time and effort reconciling asset information with reality.
Instead, you need to have a unified, single source of truth that can never be questioned.
In case you’re thinking your current tools cover this…
CMDBs Fall Short for Compliance Support
Many IT teams assume their CMDB investments allow them to store and govern the asset data they need to meet compliance and audit requirements–but they’re only half right.
While CMDBs do allow you to store asset data, they don’t have the capability to support continuous compliance monitoring.
Why?
Because CMDBs are static and require a ton of manual effort to maintain. They can’t validate or reconcile asset data, they’re essentially digital filing cabinets. You dump immense amounts of asset data into them, and in the end, you’re left with stale, out-of-date data that contributes to the panic of point-in-time compliance checks.
Plus, you can’t use them to detect data drift as it occurs or enforce lifecycle stages–and that’s vital for continuous compliance.
Lifecycle Consistency Enforces Controls
One of the biggest red flags for any SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA, or NIST auditor is missing asset lifecycle data. Yet, time and time again, enterprise IT teams lack those details. Even if they have information on who an asset went to or what stage it’s in, they’re missing timestamps or other key data points.
That’s because most of those records and transitions need to be manually ported over from one system to another–and they rarely are.
However, when you employ ITAM tools that automatically track and update lifecycle data for hardware and software assets, you ensure that every change is governed and accounted for.
You can record data and automatically trigger next steps during:
- Onboarding: Assign access based on the user. Provision a device with tracked ownership. Deploy workflows for device and account setup.
- Transitions: Adjust access and device assignments when roles change.
- Offboarding: Revoke users. Initiate workflows for device reclamation. Cancel ownership in all systems.
Some tools also allow you to govern the stages that often fall outside IT’s purview, such as procurement, staging, and final depreciation, so you have total visibility and control of the full asset lifecycle.
Continuous Compliance Monitoring Stops the Fire Drill Mentality
Once you unify your asset data into a trustworthy, single source of truth, you’re able to ensure around-the-clock compliance–without the rushed panic.
1. Gather Evidence As It Happens
Rather than scrambling to find dates and times related to lifecycle events and approvals, make evidence collection a core part of your ITAM and compliance processes. Connect your security, HR, procurement, and ITAM tools to log asset lifecycle changes in real time, with documented timestamps and approvals.
Continuously track events for hardware, software, SaaS, and cloud assets, including:
- Device assignments
- Configuration changes
- License allocations
- Security patches
You’ll have all trustworthy compliance data right in front of you to quickly answer auditor and vendor questions using records based on verified integrations, not “evidence” pieced together from tickets and spreadsheets.
2. Detect and Prevent Drift Early
Don’t wait until mid-audit to discover that half your assets are out of compliance. Automatically scan your entire asset ecosystem, including deployed and patched assets, to detect anomalies and data drift as early as possible.
Catch orphaned or inactive assets, shadow IT, and policy exceptions, and receive alerts that automatically trigger remediation before those issues become audit findings. Update internal and external compliance policies to stay on top of changes and adjust assets as needed.
3. Embed Automation into Governance and Remediation
Skip the manual efforts and automate compliance and audit prep tasks. Establish automated workflows to manage lifecycle transitions, adapt to policy changes, and eliminate blind spots.
Use low- or no-code workflows that automatically:
- Gather evidence from all lifecycle stages
- Alert you to noncompliance and data drift
- Initiate remediation tasks
4. Make Real-Time Reporting into an Ongoing KPI
Move away from seasonal audit prep and compliance checks, and create dashboards that give real-time visibility into:
- Policy monitoring
- Remediation progress
- Data drift
- Missing protections
As you transition to an operational-level, always-on approach to IT asset compliance, CISOs can continuously monitor compliance health, executives get an accurate view of compliance status in real-time, and IT teams can easily respond to compliance audit requests. Everyone wins.
5. Change the Compliance and Audit Dynamic
With unified asset management powering continuous compliance monitoring, you finally have the trustworthy, real-time data that you need to be audit-ready at a moment’s notice.
In practice, that means:
- Reduced prep time as you only have to plan for scope
- Smoother audit cycles without the constant state of stress
- Fewer follow-up questions and deeper investigations
- Shifting from defending inconsistencies to validating controls
Oomnitza Makes Continuous Compliance Monitoring Real
When some tools only enable point-in-time, chaos-inducing compliance checks, Oomnitza delivers the unified asset management, automation, and reporting enterprise IT teams need to support year-round continuous compliance monitoring.
Our modern IT asset management platform:
- Unifies your hardware, software, cloud, and SaaS asset data into a centralized, single source of truth
- Automates lifecycle management via workflows that consistently enforce controls
- Continuously monitors for drift and immediately triggers remediation
- Automatically generates audit-ready evidence using timestamped audit trails and real-time reports
We consistently empower enterprise IT teams to reduce audit prep time by 80% and achieve 98%+ data accuracy. Our customers even see a 66% improvement in audit accuracy and completeness when they use our platform as part of their compliance efforts.
Want to get started enforcing compliance controls through unified asset management and continuous monitoring? Let’s talk!
