You breathe a heavy sigh as you finally submit everything for your latest compliance check. You’ve spent weeks gathering asset data from IT, identity and access management (IAM), and security systems, and countless hours triple-checking that every small detail is accurate. Now all you have to do is wait for the confirmation that your hard work was worth it.
Except, surprise, you get news that there has been a new rules interpretation by a regional Data Protection Authority. Now you have to dive back into all your hardware and software assets to ensure everything complies with those new rules — and make changes if they don’t.
Sound familiar?
For enterprise IT teams, continued compliance is a constant game of catch-up. Endless compliance checks and security reviews that take up too much time for a team that often doesn’t have enough resources to get it all done. And despite all your efforts, it forever feels like you're falling behind and a single mistake away from a failed audit.
Something has to change–and it can when you understand all the moving parts of IT asset compliance and use modern IT asset management (ITAM) tools to unify data and validate compliance processes.
Keep reading to learn the:
- Reasons why continued IT asset compliance is so difficult
- Costly consequences of missing or inaccurate IT asset data
- Ways unified IT asset management empowers you to remain compliant and optimize costs
Why is IT Asset Compliance So Hard to Keep Up With?
While IT asset management is an ongoing task in itself, continued compliance is a never-ending process that tests even the strongest of compliance officers and IT leaders. That’s largely because everything you have to manage and the rules that govern them are constantly changing on you.
That includes:
1. Rapidly Evolving IT Environments
It’s incredibly difficult to ensure continued compliance of your assets when you’re dealing with:
- Software License Access: Regulators may not audit your software licenses—but software vendors absolutely do. Without clear visibility into who has access to what software and how it’s being used, you’re exposed to costly vendor usage audits from providers like Microsoft and VMware. Over-assignments, unused licenses, or access that persists after role changes can all trigger expensive true-ups and penalties.
- Diverse Infrastructure: Remote and hybrid work increases endpoints and makes it harder to track and govern hardware and software assets. In fact, 39% of organizations can’t complete hybrid IT inventory due to frequent asset changes.
- Complex Cloud Governance: Traditional security and audit tools aren’t built to have robust functionality for cloud systems, leading to gaps and compliance issues.
Your IT environment rarely looks the same as it did last week.
2. Data Silos from Disconnected Systems
Enterprise IT teams store asset data across dozens of IT, security, procurement, and CMDB tools. Even compliance tools start to add up, with a reported 32% of organizations using 11 or more tools/databases for audits.
When you lack ways for those tools to “talk” to each other, you end up with siloed, stale, inaccurate, and duplicated data and poor asset visibility.
In fact, 40% of organizations report IT asset data accuracy issues due to conflicting data from different tools. As a result, you can’t confidently say what’s true or which data to utilize for maintaining compliance.
3. Complex Asset Lifecycles
You need to account for every lifecycle stage if you’re going to maintain continued compliance of your IT assets. That includes:
- Pre-Deployed Assets: Those in transit, storage, and staging.
- Deployed Assets: Those that are actively assigned, in use, and patched.
- Post-Deployed Assets: Those slated for recovery, reuse, retirement, decommissioning, or final depreciation.
That’s pretty difficult when most legacy ITAM and security tools only account for “on-the-wire” assets.
(Want a complete list of lifecycle stages you need to watch? We have the full breakdown including how those stages are vulnerable to security attacks.)
4. Constantly Changing Compliance Rules
From ISO 27001 and SOC 2 to GDPR, HIPAA, and NYDFS frameworks, regulatory bodies are always updating the standards you have to meet to remain compliant–especially as more organizations onboard AI tools to manage IT assets, customer, and other sensitive data. Every year, new trends mean financial, healthcare, government, and other institutions need to adapt, and quickly.
Just as you think you have a handle on compliance requirements, new changes mean you have to start all over. No rest for the wicked, right?
5. Audit Fatigue
The never-ending compliance checks and limited resources can really take their toll on your team. It’s why nearly 70% of IT security professionals report feeling overwhelmed by the volume of compliance and audit requirements.
When teams feel that sense of burnout and frustration, they can leave your organization entirely, meaning you’re left with even less staff to help ensure continued compliance.
Without modern tools that deliver unified, real-time visibility into every asset lifecycle, you’re bound to run into data gaps that lead to major compliance issues.
What Happens If I Miss Something in My Asset Inventory?
The sky’s the limit. No, really. All it takes is missing a single asset or accidentally submitting incorrect data within a compliance check to trigger a number of consequences.
Audit Trigger
A whopping 66% of organizations have failed at least one audit over the last three years. While failing a compliance audit in the first place is bad enough, it can trigger further investigation and more frequent audits in the future.
Once certification bodies have a reason to doubt the accuracy or completeness of your compliance submissions, your reputation is damaged in their eyes, and they keep a much closer eye on you–which means more work and headaches for your IT team.
Security Exposure
It’s this simple: untracked and noncompliant devices = ungoverned and unpatched vulnerabilities = an increased attack surface.
When asset intelligence is a cornerstone for continued compliance and security, it’s worrying then that only 45% of organizations feel they have advanced asset intelligence with visibility and insight.
Without that intelligence into blind spots, you open your organizations up to security attacks on overlooked assets and data breaches, which end up costing more when they involve non-compliance with regulatory requirements.
Financial Consequences
Formal regulatory audits for frameworks like GDPR or HIPAA may only occur once every one to two years, but financial exposure from non-compliance is far more frequent. Most organizations experience multiple compliance lapses throughout the year as a result of unresolved audit findings, missed remediation deadlines, internal control failures, vendor license violations, or security gaps uncovered through internal reviews and third-party assessments.
These lapses carry real costs. Between regulatory penalties, vendor audit true-ups, remediation efforts, legal fees, and increased operational overhead, organizations incur an average of $460K per year in compliance-related costs. And when regulators become involved—often following a breach or formal investigation—those costs can escalate rapidly.
Take HIPAA as an example. Civil monetary penalties can reach over $71,000 per violation, and violations are often assessed per exposed record. That means a single incident involving 100 exposed patient records could result in up to $7.1 million in fines, before factoring in breach response costs, legal fees, or reputational damage. GDPR penalties follow a similar model at scale, where fines increase based on severity, scope, and organizational accountability.
Forget any chance of cutting costs or finding cost savings. Your lack of compliance just wiped millions from your bottom line.
Of course, you want to avoid any and all of those consequences, but continued compliance seems ever-daunting when you look at everything under your asset umbrella.
That’s when you have to move on from the traditional approach to IT asset compliance and transition to a modern, unified one.
How Do I Stay Compliant When My IT Environment Keeps Changing?
We already covered a key truth: it’s more challenging than ever to ensure asset compliance when your IT environment looks different day-to-day. But you don’t need to panic.
There are several things you can do to govern assets and ensure continued compliance, even as hardware and software data changes constantly.
Step 1. Ditch Snapshot Compliance
Point-in-time audits don’t cut it anymore–the data is outdated soon after you pull it. That’s because manual compliance checks and audit prep often fail to capture dynamic changes in SaaS, cloud, and other software asset systems.
If you’re going to provide regulatory agencies with the accurate, up-to-date data they’re looking for, you need to switch up solutions.
Step 2. Adopt a Unified ITAM System
Continued compliance is only possible when you have a tool that connects and governs your hardware, software, cloud, and SaaS assets in real-time.
While you’re currently stuck manually bouncing from tool to tool to ensure compliance, unified ITAM tools automatically gather, normalize, and federate your asset data between systems to provide an accurate data foundation that increases risk mitigation and reduces audit delays, gaps, costs, and penalties.
Step 3. Leverage Automation and Triggered Workflows
Especially when assets are moving around so quickly, you’re much better off relying on AI automation to:
- Track Policy Changes: Automatically pull compliance requirements and perform checks against assets.
- Support Lifecycle Transitions: Easily compare and reconcile compliance requirements as assets are onboarded, offboarded, and change in usage.
- Trigger Non-Compliance Alerts: Get alerts from non-compliant assets or expired software licenses for faster remediation.
- Generate Dashboards: Access real-time evidence of compliance standing and instantly pull and share reports with auditors, executives, and other stakeholders.
After reading this, does your mind immediately envision your finance team bursting your bubble because your organization is trying to reduce costs, not pay for yet another IT tool?
Well, it’s a good thing unified ITAM tools can empower continuous compliance and help cut waste.
How Can I Reduce the Cost of Staying Compliant?
Did you know that organizations spend an average of $3.5 million each year on compliance activities? That figure honestly isn’t that surprising when you consider how much time, effort, and resources go into maintaining compliance.
Why Does Compliance Cost So Much?
You’ve got:
- Manual Processes: Labor-intensive reconciliation, report generation, and remediation that take IT teams an average of 58 working days per quarter to complete.
- Duplicated Efforts: Security and ITAM teams end up doing the same work because of data silos, wasting time that could be better spent on more strategic tasks.
- Higher Headcount: When enterprise organizations have to ensure compliance for thousands of IT assets, you often need to hire and pay more staff just to make manual compliance work somewhat manageable.
And let’s not forget, any compliance mistakes, however unintentional, can result in those hefty fines that will really upset Finance.
Unified ITAM tools solve these issues, ensure continued compliance, and reduce costs by:
- Delivering Accurate Asset Inventories: The first step in ensuring IT asset compliance is knowing exactly what hardware and software assets you’re responsible for. You’re set up for success from the start.
- Monitoring for Compliance Automatically: Forget manually checking and comparing compliance policies and asset data by hand. Unified ITAM tools do this automatically, saving you time and effort.
- Speeding Up Audit Prep Time: With the right tools, you can reduce audit prep time by up to 70%, meaning you don’t have to commit as many resources to the task.
- Proactively Identifying Compliance Risks: IT teams can set up workflows to automatically monitor for and respond to compliance policy violations, decreasing the risk of fines related to noncompliance, audit failures, and security issues.
Unfortunately, not all IT asset management tools are designed to support these efforts. But guess who is?
Oomnitza Empowers Enterprise IT Teams with Automated Continued Compliance
Before you can ensure IT assets are compliant with regulatory requirements, you need to have an accurate, real-time view of your entire ecosystem.
Yet, that’s a huge challenge for enterprise IT teams. Over half (55%) of organizations have less than 75% coverage of key asset details like ownership, location, security, and lifecycle stage!
That’s where we come in with a unified view of your hardware and software assets across your IT, security, procurement, and finance systems.
Oomnitza provides audit-grade, timestamped records for each asset across its full lifecycle, enabling you to meet regulatory expectations and pass audits with confidence.
By automating data correlation, policy-based monitoring, and analytics tasks, you can more easily, accurately, and consistently:
- Assess asset controls
- Generate reports
- Identify exposures before they happen
- Mitigate compliance violations
We use a five-step process that lets you achieve continuous compliance and audit readiness.
- Scope: With Oomnitza plugged directly into your IAM, IT, and security tools, establish your compliance rules, automate the workflows that enforce them, and easily build interactive compliance dashboards and reports.
- Assess: Using low-or-no-code workflows that are easy to understand, maintain, or standardize, instantly identify compliance issues and gaps across endpoints, applications, and network + cloud infrastructures.
- Mitigate: As Oomnitza proactively addresses issues, rely on your workflows to automatically trigger alerts for approval requests, control installation or reactivation, owner reassignment, and more–all within your existing tools and ticketing systems.
- Evidence: Prove compliance with real-time reports that deliver what auditors are looking for, and push that context back to other IT management, security, and other compliance tools via Oomnitza’s 1,500+ API integrations.
- Calibration: As compliance conditions change and your environment evolves, lean on Oomnitza to adapt quickly with extended workflows, updated reports and rules, and strengthened remediation actions.
Turn Continued Compliance into a Cakewalk
When compliance continues to pose a challenge for enterprise IT teams, you can’t settle for exhausting manual processes and data silos that leave too much room for costly mistakes and security breaches.
You deserve the 98%+ accurate unified visibility, automated workflows, and audit-ready dashboards that transform your compliance process from reactive to proactive.
Ask us how you can start using Oomnitza to make it happen.
