Continuous assurance in audit: what IAM and control teams need to know

TL;DR: Periodic audit testing and spreadsheet-driven controls leave long gaps before failures are found, while SafePaaS says automated users report a 76% reduction in retesting costs for failed controls. Manual audit models are now a governance liability because assurance, evidence, and remediation have to move continuously, not quarterly.

NHIMG editorial — based on content published by SafePaaS: Audit is undergoing a seismic transformation

By the numbers:

• a North American healthcare provider cut its audit evidence preparation time by 70%

Questions worth separating out

Q: How should security teams move from periodic audits to continuous assurance?

A: Start by identifying the controls that create the most exposure when they fail late, especially access approvals, privileged access, and segregation of duties.

Q: Why do manual audit processes create so much operational risk?

A: Manual audit processes rely on people to assemble evidence after the fact, which creates delays, inconsistency, and blind spots.

Q: How do teams know whether continuous controls monitoring is working?

A: Look for faster exception detection, shorter remediation times, fewer repeat findings, and evidence that can be retrieved without manual reconstruction.

Practitioner guidance

• Move high-risk access controls to continuous validation Start with privileged access, segregation of duties, and sensitive provisioning workflows.
• Centralise evidence for audit-ready access decisions Bring approvals, exceptions, remediation status, and ownership metadata into one evidence layer so auditors do not have to reconstruct control history from ERP, HR, finance, and ITSM exports.
• Automate retesting for recurring control failures Define repeatable fixes for the control breaks that keep reappearing, such as SoD conflicts or unapproved access changes, and capture the outcome so the same issue does not return at the next review cycle.

What's in the full article

SafePaaS's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• Daily control-testing workflow examples for ERP, HR, finance, and ITSM environments
• Dashboard and reporting patterns for board-ready continuous assurance programmes
• Evidence-management mechanics for reducing audit prep time and retesting overhead
• Policy-driven enforcement examples for segregation of duties, privilege access, and related control sets

👉 Read SafePaaS's article on continuous audit assurance and control automation →

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