Stop doing security theater. Start shipping evidence.

If you’re a CISO, a SOC lead, or the security architect, everyone pings when something’s on fire, you already know the dirty secret of “being compliant”:

Compliance isn’t hard because the controls are hard. It’s hard because the proof is a scavenger hunt designed by someone who has never tried to answer the question: “Who can assume admin in AWS right now?” while their inbox explodes and the auditor politely clears their throat.

And that scavenger hunt is getting harder. Auditors are no longer satisfied with static screenshots and annual attestations; they’re increasingly asking for continuous evidence, machine-generated reports, and clear explanations of automated decision-making, especially where AI and autonomous systems are involved. Gartner predicts that in 2026, organizations will be required to demonstrate ongoing control assurance and provide AI audit logs for AI-driven and automated processes, not just point-in-time compliance. Meanwhile, regulators and auditors are aligning around the expectation that systems that act on behalf of humans must produce traceable, auditable decision records. In other words, proof that your automation can explain itself when asked.

And look, nobody got into security because they love collecting screenshots. Yet here we are, spending chunks of the year building an “audit scrapbook” that proves we’re responsible adults.

The data backs up the pain. Teams spend the equivalent of 12 working weeks per year on compliance-related tasks, plus 9 working weeks on vendor reviews and risk assessments. That’s not governance. That’s a second job we didn’t apply for.

Meanwhile, the same people doing this admin work are also… meant to be defending the organization.

ISACA found 66% of cybersecurity pros say their role is more stressful than it was five years ago.  And ISC2 reported a global workforce gap of about 4.8 million people. So yes: we’re understaffed, stressed, and somehow still expected to hand-label every piece of evidence like it’s a museum exhibit.

If audits and compliance feel “beneath you,” it’s not arrogance. It’s your brain correctly recognizing low-value work hiding inside high-stakes work.

The Real Problem: Proof Is Detached From Control

Most audit misery comes from a broken model:

1. Controls live in production (cloud roles, CI/CD permissions, service accounts, identity providers, policies).
2. Proof lives in spreadsheets (tickets, screenshots, “trust me bro” change logs).
3. Audit season is the frantic attempt to stitch the two together.

That gap creates three predictable outcomes:

• Your best engineers become evidence clerks and Ctrl + C/Ctrl + V monkeys.
• Your evidence is error-prone because humans copy/paste under pressure.
• You optimize for optics (what auditors can easily check) instead of outcomes (what reduces risk).

There’s a reason Trustle advisor Bruce Schneier’s line still bites: “Security is a process, not a product.” Compliance should be the same: a process that produces proof continuously, not a yearly craft project.

Phil Venables makes the grown-up point security teams sometimes forget when they’re knee-deep in rage: compliance isn’t useless; it’s just not the finish line. It’s “necessary but not sufficient.” 

So the play isn’t “ignore compliance.” The play is: make compliance part of how you operate.

The Fix: Turn “Evidence” Into a By-Product

If you want compliance to stop dragging your team down, you need to stop treating evidence as something you assemble and start treating it as something you generate.

The clean way to do that is to anchor compliance around the thing auditors actually care about (even if they don’t always phrase it well):

Access. Who can do what, when, and under what conditions, and can you prove it?

Once you accept that, the solution shape becomes obvious:

1) Default to Just-In-Time (JIT) access

Permanent privilege is convenient… right up until it becomes permanent evidence of poor control.

A modern approach is to grant privileged access only when needed, with:

• tight scope (least privilege),
• a clear reason,
• a short time window,
• and automatic expiry.

That’s how you get a security program that’s both safer and easier to audit, because every privileged event has a beginning, a middle, and an end — and the end is automatic.

2) Go Zero-Standing Privilege where you can

“Standing admin” is the audit equivalent of leaving your car unlocked and putting a Post-it on the windscreen saying Please don’t steal this.

Zero-standing privilege flips the default: nobody just “has admin.” They request it, get it briefly, then lose it. That single design choice reduces blast radius, reduces insider risk, and gives you neat, tidy evidence trails.

3) Centralize entitlement visibility across AWS/Azure/GCP

Multi-cloud reality: permissions are fragmented, naming is inconsistent, and “who can do what” becomes archaeology.

What auditors want is clarity:

• who has access,
• what that access enables,
• how it was approved,
• whether it’s reviewed,
• and whether it’s revoked when no longer needed.

So you want a unified view that can normalize entitlements and highlight:

• over-privileged users,
• dormant privileges,
• orphaned identities,
• risky paths to admin.

4) Replace screenshots with audit-grade timelines

This is the big one. Evidence should look less like a Pinterest board and more like a ledger:

• access request (who/what/why),
• approval (who approved),
• policy applied (what constraints),
• revocation (when it ended),
• exception handling (if any).

When that’s built in, audits become a query, not a season.

Organizations spend around 4,300 hours annually achieving or maintaining compliance. That’s precisely the kind of waste you claw back when evidence is continuously produced by the system doing the control.

What This Looks Like in Practice

A modern cloud identity security platform built for this problem typically bundles:

• JIT privileged access for cloud roles and sensitive actions
• Zero-standing privileges (time-bound, policy-scoped elevation)
• Entitlement visibility across AWS/Azure/GCP (who-can-do-what, including risk signals)
• Automated revocation and policy enforcement (no “I’ll remove it later,” because later is a myth)
• Audit-ready reporting that maps approvals, access history, and change trails to common controls

Net effect: the security team stops handcrafting evidence and starts exporting it.

And this isn’t a regional problem. Globally, regulatory complexity is only moving in one direction. PwC’s Global Compliance Survey found that 85% of organizations worldwide say compliance requirements have become more complex over the past three years. More rules, more scrutiny, and the same headcount means you either automate the grind or you drown politely.

The Takeaway You Can Put on a Slide

Audits and compliance feel beneath you when they’re treated like admin.

When you treat access as an operational control, JIT, tight scope, auto-expiry, and provable trails, compliance becomes a side effect. The auditor asks for evidence, and nobody panics. You just… export the receipts. Boom.