In my experience with highly regulated industries like finance, healthcare, or technology, I’ve seen organizations typically undergo an average of 8-12 audits annually. Each audit can last anywhere from 1 to 6 months, tying up critical resources and personnel just to remain compliant. If you think compliance is limited to only a few regulations, it may surprise you to learn that there are over 170 regulations in the global digital payments sector alone. With new regulations introduced each year, companies are increasingly using regulatory compliance as a competitive advantage. However, this can become expensive and often pushes smaller competitors out of the market.

With such a crowded and complex regulatory landscape, I frequently hear questions from organizations asking whether compliance is only attainable for larger companies that have the resources to keep up. The reality is that beyond achieving compliance, the cost of non-compliance is skyrocketing—on average, non-compliance costs are 2.71 times higher than compliance costs. At the 2024 PCI NA Community Meeting, I shared insights into how organizations can sidestep these rising costs, growing complexity, and talent burnout by rethinking their approach to audits. I introduced the concept of unified audits, a streamlined solution that enables organizations to manage multiple regulatory frameworks more efficiently while significantly reducing manual efforts, costs, and risks.

Why do we need to buck the traditional auditing process?

Over the years, I’ve witnessed that traditional audit processes come with many challenges. Organizations undergo multiple, often overlapping audits for standards like PCI DSS, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and SOC2. Coordinating these audits requires significant time and resources, disrupting business operations. Managing data across diverse and complex IT environments can be difficult, leading to inconsistencies and challenges in maintaining data integrity. Compliance comes with a high cost, exacerbated by redundant efforts, limited resources, and multiple audit cycles, which strains business finances. Moreover, audit fatigue and limited expertise across frameworks place added pressure on internal teams, making it hard to keep pace with regulatory demands.

Unified audits offer a solution by streamlining compliance across multiple regulations—such as PCI DSS, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and SOC2—through a single audit effort. Instead of conducting separate audits for each framework, this approach consolidates efforts, allowing organizations to reuse evidence and align compliance activities across different standards.

The Three Horsemen of Unified Audits

This unified approach involves a single platform that orchestrates evidence collection, task assignment, and evidence mapping across different standards. Artificial Intelligence (AI) automates repetitive tasks such as evidence review, report generation, and compliance tracking, reducing manual intervention and accelerating audit cycles. Meanwhile, human auditors provide critical oversight, ensuring customized assessments, ethical considerations, and nuanced decision-making based on organizational needs.

The unified platform is the backbone of this approach, enabling organizations to manage multiple audits through a single system. It consolidates evidence collection, automates mapping across frameworks, and reduces redundancies. For instance, a company that has recently completed a PCI DSS audit may already have 60-70% of the evidence needed for an ISO 27001 or SOC2 audit. By reducing the number of evidence points needing collection by 20-30%, organizations can significantly improve audit efficiency.

A unified platform is just the first piece of the puzzle. The second, which has been a major focus over the past three years, is AI (Artificial Intelligence). AI plays a pivotal role in simplifying the audit process, reducing manual workloads by up to 35%, accelerating compliance cycles by 20-30%, and lowering operational costs by 20-25%. AI helps review submitted evidence against control requirements for various standards, drastically reduces the time required for manual reporting by generating draft reports, and identifies compliance gaps through proactive monitoring. Project tracking features help monitor timelines, milestones, and potential delays.

We’ve established the important role that AI will play in unified audits, but does this mean AI powered tools will replace human beings? Absolutely not, while AI and automation are valuable, they cannot replace human auditors who bring critical context, judgment, and adaptability to the process. Human auditors are essential in interpreting anomalies with consideration of the organization’s specific context, ensuring compliance aligns not just with the letter of the law but with its ethical intent, and providing feedback that helps refine AI tools and models based on real-world experience.

Unified Audits for efficient compliance

From my experience, adopting a unified audit approach offers several benefits. By reducing manual workloads, organizations can free up their teams to focus on more strategic initiatives. Streamlined workflows accelerate compliance cycles by 20-30%, helping to complete audits swiftly. Proactive monitoring minimizes compliance failures by 15-20%, reducing the risk of legal penalties and business disruptions. Additionally, with automation and AI, businesses can lower operational costs by up to 25%. Unified audits are the future of compliance. By combining automation, AI, and human expertise, we can address the growing complexity of regulatory requirements. Streamlining the audit process not only reduces costs but also strengthens security and collaboration across an organization. Implementing a unified audit approach helps simplify compliance and fortify the organization’s overall security posture—a strategy that is essential for the future of compliance.