The founder’s guide to automated compliance software
An overview from Christina
Before I founded Vanta in 2018, very few startups had a SOC 2, the most commonly accepted standard for demonstrating security. That’s because preparing for a SOC 2 was a time-consuming, expensive, and very manual process (think lots of spreadsheets and screenshots). If you were a founder of a growing startup and you had to choose between building new features or implementing a security program, you’d likely go with the former.
But good security isn’t just nice to have—or only for large organizations with the resources to invest in security programs. With more of our businesses and lives now online, and AI quickly transforming technology as we know it, there’s increasing demand for software companies of all sizes to get secure and prove it. In fact, two-thirds of businesses say that their customers, investors, and suppliers are increasingly looking for proof of security and compliance according to our annual State of Trust Report.
To meet buyer demand, companies from early-stage startups to global enterprises have to spend more time proving their security by pursuing compliance standards like SOC 2 or ISO 27001. That’s where automated compliance software comes in.
What you should know about compliance
Before we get into the ins and outs of automated compliance software, let’s start with a quick primer on compliance.
Compliance simply means all the things you have to do to ensure your organization is meeting the standards set forth in relevant laws, regulations, or best practices. While compliance can apply to different areas ranging from workplace safety to financial reporting, I’m focusing specifically on security compliance in this article since the automated compliance category was born out of a market need for a faster and easier path to demonstrating trust.
Security compliance frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, and others outline the guidelines, controls, and processes that your organization should implement to ensure ethical and legal conduct, protect sensitive information, mitigate risks, and maintain a secure environment. Established by third-party entities, these frameworks give companies a way to verify their security practices by going through an audit. They typically fall into one of three buckets:
- Industry standards and best practices: Frameworks like SOC 2 and ISO 27001 are voluntary and define information security best practices. While there is no legal requirement to implement them, they are widely accepted standards for proving security.
- Regulatory compliance: Established by governmental and regulatory bodies, these frameworks are required and enforce laws that are meant to protect public interest, consumer rights, data privacy, and other critical aspects of business operations. Examples include HIPAA, GDPR, and CCPA.
- Risk management: These are compliance frameworks that address risk management by identifying potential threats and vulnerabilities and provide guidance on implementing controls to mitigate those risks. Although technically not required, they are in practice. Common industry standards for risk management include the NIST Risk Management Framework and ISO 31000.
Whether you’re getting your first SOC 2 or maturing your program, investing in compliance is a commitment to upleveling your security. And by demonstrating that security, you can unblock revenue and grow your business. Take it from fast-growing companies like Newfront, incident.io, and ChiliPiper that have all turned compliance into new market opportunities.
Automated compliance software vs. other approaches
If you’re looking to get your first SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification, there are essentially three approaches you can take.
The first is what I call DIY compliance. You’re doing everything in-house, which means spending hundreds of hours writing policies, implementing controls, and taking tons of screenshots for evidence. It can be overwhelming, especially if you’re new to security compliance.
Your second option is to hire a cybersecurity consultant to run and manage your compliance project. This can be helpful if you need outside expertise, but it can also be very expensive and time-consuming. Additionally, the consultant probably won’t know your company, so you’ll need to bring them up to speed before they can be effective.
Then there’s automated compliance software. Pioneered by Vanta, automated compliance tools not only give you step-by-step guidance to get you ready for an audit; they also streamline and automate manual processes—like setting controls, collecting evidence, ensuring employees complete security training, policy acceptance tracking, just to name a few—to save you time and money on your compliance efforts.
Not all automated compliance software solutions are the same, though, so you’ll want to look for some key capabilities.
What to look for in automated compliance software
So you’re ready to establish your security foundation with the help of automated compliance software. In the past few years, this has become a crowded space, with dozens of options out there. Having helped thousands of companies successfully prepare for and complete compliance audits, I can say that the best solutions not only meet your immediate needs (like getting your first SOC 2 to unblock a deal), but can also scale as your security program matures and your company grows. Here’s what I recommend prioritizing:
Comprehensive, cross-mapped framework coverage: The best automated compliance tools support a wide range of compliance frameworks, from widely accepted standards like SOC 2 and ISO 27001, to industry-specific frameworks like HIPAA and PCI-DSS, and region-specific ones like GDPR and Cyber Essentials. Many of these frameworks have overlapping controls and requirements, so with an automated compliance tool, you can pursue additional frameworks without duplicating work.
Automatic evidence collection: With an automated compliance tool, you no longer have to spend countless hours manually taking screenshots to provide evidence for an audit. The best tools will run tests against your controls and automatically collect the evidence—including cloud configuration settings, incident reports and response logs, employee offboarding and onboarding records, and more. When choosing an automated compliance solution, look into what percentage of a framework’s controls have a test associated with them and whether those tests are automated versus manual.
Continuous controls monitoring: What sets the best automated compliance tools apart is their ability to run frequent, automated tests against the security controls you have in place. Unlike point-in-time checks, if something falls out of compliance, you can address it right away—similar to how you’d use a cloud monitoring tool for your engineering infrastructure.
Breadth of integrations: Integrations are essential to powering automated compliance. They enable continuous monitoring across your tech stack (such as your cloud provider, data warehouse provider, HRIS, and more), giving you real-time visibility into compliance posture and alerting you of any issues that need to be remediated. The more integrations that your automated compliance tool offers, the more it can automate.
People management workflows: To accelerate your compliance journey, be sure to look for automated compliance tools that come with built-in security worfklows for people management. Things like onboarding and offboarding employees or keeping track of who’s completed security awareness training can eat up time, but a robust tool can automate this for you, too.
Policies: Creating and implementing new policies can be one of the most time-consuming areas of getting compliant. That’s why you should look for an automated compliance tool that comes with policy templates and provides step-by-step guidance on what’s required (versus what’s optional) in your policies. Additionally, your tools should be able to automatically track when policies have been approved by leaders and accepted by employees.
All-in-one experience: Preparing for a compliance audit means that in addition to implementing your controls and collecting evidence, you’ll also need to run background checks on personnel, complete penetration testing, and get cybersecurity insurance. You’ll of course also need to find an external auditor who is qualified to do your audit. For example, if you are seeking a SOC 2, you will need to work with a licensed CPA (Certified Public Accountant) firm. The leading automated compliance tools make it easy to add on these additional capabilities and services with one click.
Support and services: To get the most value out of an automated compliance tool, be sure to consider the support and services being offered by the vendor. Strong onboarding will get you on the path to compliance sooner and having access to both technical and compliance experts will help you stay on track from start to finish. If you need further guidance on your compliance effort or have a compressed timeline, see what professional services are available. For example, Vanta’s SOC 2 Quick Start program gets you audit-ready in eight weeks by pairing you with compliance experts.
Auditor experience: In addition to helping you get ready before your compliance audit, your automated compliance tool should also make it easy to collaborate and communicate with your auditor. The best tools provide seamless auditor access as well as the tools they need to review progress, check evidence, and flag any issues with you directly—all within the same platform.
External trust centers: Once you’ve done the work to get secure and completed your audit, how do you easily show it to customers and prospects? Automated compliance tools that enable you to implement a public-facing trust center make it easy to not only showcase commonly requested documents (like your SOC 2 report or ISO 27001 certification) but also provide real-time evidence for your passing controls. This way, you can show how secure your organization was at the time of your audit as well as how secure you are right now.
In just a handful of years, the automated compliance category has grown and evolved rapidly from “SOC 2 in a box” solutions to comprehensive platforms for building, managing, and demonstrating trust. As product innovation in the space continues, I’m excited for these tools to build on current capabilities and become the one-stop shop for fast-growing companies to establish their security foundation.
