The Promise
Compliance automation platforms have exploded in popularity. Vanta, Drata, Secureframe, Thoropass, Sprinto, and others all promise a similar value proposition: connect your cloud infrastructure, automatically collect evidence, monitor your controls continuously, and breeze through your SOC 2 audit.
The promise is appealing, especially for SaaS companies where engineering time is the scarcest resource. Automate the tedious parts, reduce the manual burden, get compliant faster. What’s not to like?
Quite a bit, actually, if you mistake the tool for the program.
What They Do Well
Evidence Collection
This is where automation platforms genuinely shine. Connecting to AWS, GCP, Azure, GitHub, Okta, and other tools to automatically pull evidence of control operation saves significant time. Instead of manually screenshotting access reviews, encryption configurations, and deployment logs, the platform does it for you.
Continuous Monitoring
Good platforms monitor your environment for configuration drift and control failures. If someone disables MFA, opens a security group, or deploys without a review, the platform flags it. This is genuinely valuable for maintaining security posture between audits.
Policy Templates
Most platforms provide template policies you can customize. For companies starting from scratch, this accelerates the documentation phase. Having a starting point is better than staring at a blank page.
Audit Management
Platforms streamline the audit process by organizing evidence, facilitating auditor access, and tracking the status of evidence requests. This coordination layer saves time for both your team and your auditor.
Employee Onboarding and Training
Many platforms include security awareness training, policy acknowledgment tracking, and onboarding workflows. This handles a compliance requirement that’s important but tedious to manage manually.
What They Don’t Solve
Security Judgment
A platform can tell you that a control exists or doesn’t exist. It can’t tell you whether your controls are the right ones for your risk profile. It can’t evaluate whether your risk assessment is thorough. It can’t determine whether your incident response plan would actually work in a crisis.
Compliance requires judgment: what’s material, what’s acceptable risk, how to prioritize remediation, when to push back on a customer request. Automation doesn’t provide judgment.
Control Design
Automation platforms monitor controls. They don’t design them. If your access control model is wrong, the platform will happily collect evidence that the wrong model is operating consistently. Garbage in, garbage out.
Someone needs to understand your architecture, your threat model, and the specific requirements of your target framework to design controls that are both effective and efficient. That’s expertise, not automation.
Gap Remediation
When the platform identifies a gap, someone needs to actually fix it. And “fix it” often means making architectural decisions, writing procedures, changing development workflows, or implementing new tools. The platform tells you the gap exists. It doesn’t close it.
Customer and Auditor Communication
Your customers don’t interact with your GRC platform. They read your SOC 2 report, review your security questionnaire responses, and evaluate your security posture through conversations with your team. Automation doesn’t answer the nuanced questions that come up in enterprise procurement.
Similarly, when your auditor has questions about a control, someone needs to explain the context: why you made certain design decisions, how compensating controls work, and what your risk rationale is. The platform provides evidence. A person provides understanding.
Multi-Framework Strategy
Most platforms handle SOC 2 well. ISO 27001 support is improving. But managing a multi-framework program (SOC 2 + ISO 27001 + HIPAA + GDPR) requires strategic thinking about control rationalization, evidence reuse, and audit sequencing that goes beyond what any platform offers.
Organizational Change
Compliance isn’t just a technical problem. It requires changes to how your organization operates: how engineering handles change management, how HR conducts onboarding, how leadership prioritizes security investment. Automation platforms don’t drive organizational change.
The Right Mental Model
Think of compliance automation platforms the way you think about project management tools. Jira doesn’t make your team productive. It provides structure for a team that’s already doing the work of being productive. Similarly, a GRC platform doesn’t make you compliant. It provides structure for a compliance program that’s already being managed effectively.
The formula that works:
Expertise (knowing what to do) + Automation (doing it efficiently) = Effective compliance program
Automation without expertise produces a platform full of green checkmarks that don’t reflect real security. Expertise without automation produces a solid program that’s unnecessarily labor-intensive. You want both.
How We Use Automation at Concerto
We’re not anti-automation. We work with clients who use Vanta, Drata, Secureframe, and other platforms. We also work with clients who use spreadsheets and shared drives. The tool matters less than the program.
When we work with a client that has a GRC platform, we:
- Configure it correctly so it’s monitoring the right things and not generating noise
- Supplement it with expertise for control design, risk assessment, gap remediation, and audit strategy
- Use it as the evidence layer while we provide the strategic and operational layer
- Integrate it into the broader program rather than treating it as the program itself
When we work with a client without a platform, we evaluate whether one would add enough value to justify the cost. For a company pursuing SOC 2 only, a platform often pays for itself in evidence collection efficiency. For a company with a more complex multi-framework program, the platform may handle the SOC 2 layer while we manage everything else.
Making the Decision
A GRC platform makes sense when:
- You have a technical team that can integrate and maintain the platform
- Your primary goal is SOC 2 evidence collection automation
- You want continuous monitoring of your cloud environment
- You have (or are hiring) compliance expertise to drive the program
A GRC platform isn’t enough when:
- You need strategic compliance leadership (what to do, not just how to track it)
- You’re managing multiple frameworks and need cross-framework optimization
- You don’t have internal compliance expertise to interpret and act on the platform’s output
- You need someone to own the program, not just the tool
The most effective compliance programs we see combine automation for efficiency with experienced professionals for strategy, judgment, and execution. Schedule a consultation to talk about the right approach for your organization.
