Notifications
Clear all
Topic starter
25/06/2026 3:19 pm
TL;DR: Cloud adoption and rising regulatory scrutiny are forcing audit functions beyond checklist-based evidence collection, with Thomson Reuters finding nearly two-thirds of audit firms are considering progressive digital technologies in their workflow. Legacy ERP-native and manual audit processes struggle with siloed data, bias risk, and incomplete evidence, making independence a governance requirement rather than a reporting preference.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by SafePaaS: The Audit Landscape Is Changing and the case for independent audit platforms
By the numbers:
- Organizations that describe themselves as confident in their AI deployment actually experience a 72% security incident rate, compared to 33% for those who remain cautious.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should organisations design audit processes so evidence stays independent of operations?
A: They should separate evidence collection, review, and reporting from the teams that run the underlying business systems.
Q: Why do cloud environments make audit and compliance harder to govern?
A: Cloud environments spread evidence across more systems, identities, and change layers than a single ERP or on-prem stack.
Q: What breaks when audit evidence is managed by the same team being audited?
A: The assurance model breaks because the team under review can influence what is captured, when it is captured, and how findings are presented.
Practitioner guidance
- Separate audit ownership from operational control Assign audit evidence collection, review, and reporting to teams that do not administer the business systems being audited.
- Centralize evidence in an immutable repository Move audit artefacts out of spreadsheets, email chains, and ERP-native attachments into a protected store with strong logging, retention controls, and tamper-evident history.
- Map every audit touchpoint to an accountable identity Document which human users, service accounts, and system roles can create, modify, approve, or export audit evidence.
What's in the full article
SafePaaS's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- How the independent audit architecture is structured across business systems and evidence repositories
- The specific controls used to support tamper-resistant evidence handling and cross-system reporting
- The vendor's stated operating model for reducing audit cycle time and improving remediation handling
- The white paper's implementation framing for teams evaluating audit independence at scale
👉 Read SafePaaS's article on independent audit architecture and compliance assurance →
Audit independence and compliance assurance: what changes for teams?
Explore further
25/06/2026 4:47 pm
Independent audit is really an identity governance problem wearing a finance label: if the people who operate business systems can also shape audit evidence, then audit independence is already broken. That failure mode is not about dashboards or reporting speed. It is about whether access, workflow, and evidence handling are governed separately enough to make the result trustworthy. Practitioners should treat audit platforms as part of the control plane, not a back-office convenience.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Organizations that describe themselves as confident in their AI deployment actually experience a 72% security incident rate, compared to 33% for those who remain cautious, according to The 2026 Infrastructure Identity Survey.
- Only 13% of security leaders feel extremely prepared for the reality of agentic AI, even as the majority continue to race toward autonomous adoption.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should own audit independence in a modern identity programme?
A: Ownership should sit with governance functions that can operate outside transaction teams, with clear accountability for evidence integrity and reporting. For identity programmes, that means IAM, IGA, and compliance teams must agree on who can approve access to audit data, who can modify evidence, and who can certify control outcomes.
👉 Read our full editorial: Independent audit platforms are reshaping compliance assurance
