Blog

How to reduce audit fatigue: 5 remedies for InfoSec pros

Disengaged teams? Decline in productivity? These are clear signs your organization has audit fatigue

Katrina Dalao
Sr. Content Marketing Specialist, CIPM
May 8, 2023

What is audit fatigue?
5 causes of audit fatigue (and proven remedies)

It’s a common security compliance scenario: Teams are typically ready and willing to meet InfoSec program requirements to complete audits on schedule and without surprises. And why not? Safeguarding against cybersecurity threats is hugely rewarding and positively impacts operations.

In time, however, as security responsibilities scale, an organization’s resources can spread too thin. Being tasked to collect evidence for every audit and business scope — on top of core job responsibilities — is a quick road to audit fatigue.

In this article, we cover the basics of audit fatigue, its leading causes, and proven ways to prevent fatigue in your organization.

What is audit fatigue?

Audit fatigue (also known as compliance fatigue) is the feeling of constant exhaustion, tiredness, or general lack of energy that someone experiences when they’re repeatedly pulled away from their core work to help satisfy an audit or assessment.

While typically used in reference to a single person, audit fatigue can also be an organization-wide occurrence that drains overall time and resources.

Some tell-tale signs of audit fatigue include:

Disengaged employees
Decreased work output
Reduced concentration or focus
Increased mistakes and missed deadlines
Resentment of compliance tasks

Left unaddressed, audit fatigue will not only lower employee performance and motivation, but leave organizations more exposed to cyber risks, data breaches, and other potential damage.

A common compliance scenario

One look at the security compliance process, and it’s easy to see how teams can get fatigued.

Take SOC 2, for example, one of the most requested InfoSec frameworks in North America. While SOC 2 Type 2 has no prescriptive controls, it checks for compliance across key trust service categories, from privacy and security to processing integrity.

Audits are conducted every year, during which external auditors perform spot checks to verify continuous compliance throughout the 12-month observation period. This single framework alone can take a minimum of three to six months and significant resources to prove compliance.

Now multiply that by the number of security frameworks your organization needs. Without proper planning, security programs can prove to be ineffective, or worse, a source of strain and resentment among teams.

5 causes of audit fatigue (and proven remedies)

If you see signs of audit fatigue in your organization, the next step is to look at what might be draining your team’s energy. Here are some of the causes behind audit fatigue:

1. Leaving security as an afterthought behind other business objectives

One of the major causes of compliance fatigue is not having controls scoped in line with business operations. Without proper guidance or communication, organizations will easily deviate from the security best practices that don’t suit their objectives, which leads to reactive remediation practices any time an audit is on the horizon.

The result? A chaotic work environment where tasks are assigned haphazardly and teams are working overtime to complete tasks — or re-implement controls — on a tight schedule.

While an ad hoc approach is to be expected when getting a program off the ground, staying at this level of security compliance maturity for too long will likely lead to compliance fatigue.

Remedy: Set a clear InfoSec compliance strategy

The first step to combat compliance fatigue is making sure your entire organization understands the importance of its InfoSec compliance program.

“If you’re just trying to check a box here, check a box there, and you don’t understand the larger picture or vision of why we’re trying to comply with this framework or regulation, then it does get a little harder,” says Tim Carrington, Information Security Compliance Manager at CSC Global. “You need to make sure the organization understands its importance… and that culture comes from the top.”

Establishing a clear InfoSec strategy and risk-based culture goes a long way in helping organizations engage their teams to take ownership and make InfoSec compliance by-design across operations.

2. Keeping information in organizational silos

It’s natural for various business units to work using their own tools and technologies. Without an easy way to access information and find synergies across functions, however, organization-wide compliance is nearly impossible.

Operating in silos prevents sharing information and creates an overall lack of visibility throughout the compliance process, which can quickly lead to unchecked inconsistencies in how controls are implemented across different business scopes.

Even after audits are completed, many organizations working within siloed environments struggle to establish and measure their operations across a consistent compliance baseline. This limits the potential benefits that can be gained from applying insights and remediation efforts throughout the organization.

Remedy: Centralize compliance data and reporting

InfoSec compliance is an organization-wide effort and providing stakeholders with visibility into security controls, collected evidence, and required protocols is critical to its success.

By consolidating relevant information across business dimensions and frameworks, InfoSec teams can significantly reduce the time spent pooling together disparate data and gain a better understanding of their current audit progress and security posture across various scopes.

A centralized compliance management tool makes it easier to notify the entire organization when new requirements and regulatory changes are being adopted and reinforce InfoSec governance and best practices across different areas of the business, effectively maintaining consistency throughout the process.

3. Sticking to manual audit processes

For most teams, manual evidence collection is the most painful part of an audit. It’s a tedious and time-consuming endeavor, and the amount of evidence required for even one audit can be daunting.

Even organizations that use automation for certain functions often still have manual stopgaps when it comes to sharing or consolidating information between teams.

When the majority of compliance and data management tasks are manual, this adds unnecessary work for teams and prolongs audit readiness.

Remedy: Apply automation across workflows

Achieving a continuous state of compliance is impossible without automation. For any organization to scale its InfoSec program while preventing compliance fatigue, it needs an IT security management platform to integrate directly into its tech stack, automate routine manual tasks, and streamline existing workflows.

Leading companies apply automation across several InfoSec processes, including collecting and verifying evidence, tracking regulatory compliance changes, and mapping risks to controls. Not only will automation lighten the team’s workload, it also accelerates the organization’s time spent preparing for internal and external audits.

Compliance Automation can automate as much as 50% of your evidence collection and reduce the work by up to 60% across each additional product or business unit.

4. Doing duplicative work

In proving compliance for multiple frameworks, teams are often asked to submit the same evidence and requirements several times a year. And given the ongoing nature of security compliance, this type of duplicative work can quickly add up every year.

Repeating the same exact work is not only exhausting for InfoSec professionals managing various frameworks, but also for the entire organization that’s being asked to produce the same information over and over again. It’s an inefficient use of time and gets in the way of teams fulfilling their other core activities.

Duplications are also not easily reconciled, especially when using legacy tools, which leaves a stockpile of redundant reports and massive data sprawl. Even with subscriptions to common control content providers, there can often be a significant disconnect between the control language and your internal control operations.

Remedy: Find common controls and reduce redundancies

Most organizations don’t realize that different security frameworks have a number of controls and requirements in common.

For example, the PCI DSS 4.0, a security standard that ensures all companies that accept, process, store, or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment, shares a 56% overlap with ISO 27001:2013 and a 45% overlap* with HIPAA compliance. So if an organization demonstrates full compliance with PCI DSS 4.0, it can then use the same evidence to satisfy either the ISO 27001:2013 or HIPAA framework.

Identifying these overlaps and effectively mapping evidence across control requirements to test once, comply many saves time, increases efficiencies, and reduces the likelihood of duplicative work.

5. Limiting evidence collection to point-in-time external audits

It’s common for one organization to comply with many frameworks and schedule audits throughout the year. To prepare for any type of audit, teams of security professionals and control owners have to dedicate significant time and effort to collect all the necessary evidence.

However, these efforts are typically reported within external auditor systems. Once a particular audit is complete, teams move on to the next audit, oftentimes collecting the same evidence for common controls and requirements. This creates a never-ending treadmill of duplicative security compliance tasks that eventually lead to burn-out and frustration.

Remedy: Work toward continuous improvement

One way to move beyond point-in-time external audits is to leverage your own system of record to hand-off evidence requests, action findings, and other audit inquires during the project. By maintaining your own system of record, evidence can be reused across relevant frameworks.

Beyond short-term efficiencies, your organization can also leverage year-over-year insights to benchmark program performance, analyze any auditor bias, and operationalize your compliance program as a means of continuous improvement.

Security compliance is increasingly critical to an organization’s ability to do business. However, it's not as simple as setting up an InfoSec program and considering yourself compliant.

Organizations need the right security strategy and systems in place that will prevent duplicative work, strained resources, and overall compliance confusion.

By knowing the signs and causes of audit fatigue, as well as the best ways to safeguard against them, you can ensure your InfoSec teams and control owners are set up for security program success.

Learn more about how OneTrust Compliance Automation can help you build, scale, and automate your security compliance program.

* OneTrust InfoSec Labs team analysis, as of 04/2023

Blog

How to reduce audit fatigue: 5 remedies for InfoSec pros

Table of contents

What is audit fatigue?

A common compliance scenario

5 causes of audit fatigue (and proven remedies)

1. Leaving security as an afterthought behind other business objectives

2. Keeping information in organizational silos

3. Sticking to manual audit processes

4. Doing duplicative work

5. Limiting evidence collection to point-in-time external audits

You may also like

Technology Risk & Compliance

Operational resilience in a changing world: Going beyond compliance

Join this session to unpack key regulations, such as ISO 27001, APRA CPS 230, DORA, & SOC2, to learn how they impact internal & third-party operations.

February 20, 2025

Technology Risk & Compliance

OneTrust Tech Risk and Compliance demo video

Watch this demo video to learn how OneTrust Tech Risk and Compliance simplifies compliance and supports effective risk management.

February 13, 2025

Technology Risk & Compliance

Compliance Automation product showcase

Join our live demonstration and see how Compliance Automaiton can help boost compliance efficiency with automated workflows, shared evidence, and 40+ frameworks.

December 19, 2024

Technology Risk & Compliance

The PDPL in Saudi Arabia is now in effect: is your business ready?

Join our Saudi Arabia PDPL webinar for an overview on the data protection law, its requirements, and how to prepare for full enforcement.

December 12, 2024

Technology Risk & Compliance

Elevating client compliance with OneTrust Automation: Key strategies for partners

Discover how to use OneTrust Compliance Automation to establish client baselines, improve efficiency, and drive scalability. Learn key strategies to enhance your compliance impact.

December 11, 2024

Technology Risk & Compliance

Understanding the NIS 2 Directive: Compliance insights and best practices

This DataGuidance webinar explores the latest and expected developments in the implementation of the NIS 2 Directive, focusing on practical compliance strategies to ensure your organization is prepared.

December 04, 2024

Technology Risk & Compliance

Tech risk and compliance masterclass: An evidence-based approach to building by-design risk and compliance practices

Discover strategies to embed compliance and risk management into business processes with minimal disruption, using technology-driven solutions for efficiency, scalability, and improvement.

November 06, 2024

Technology Risk & Compliance

Building a strong security posture: Managing compliance, risk, and business engagement in a dynamic landscape

Join our webinar to learn how to optimize security posture, streamline compliance, and leverage automation to manage IT risk in today's complex digital landscape. Register now!

October 29, 2024

Privacy Automation

Build resiliency and operationalize compliance with OneTrust: Fall product release recap, 2024

Join our upcoming product release webinar to explore how these new capabilities can help your organization navigate complex frameworks, streamline third-party management, and accelerate AI and data innovation.

October 22, 2024

Technology Risk & Compliance

Tech risk & compliance masterclass: The anatomy of a framework

Master the fundamentals of constructing robust compliance frameworks that can seamlessly integrate with organizational operations while aligning with regulatory and strategic mandates to deliver measurable insights on your progress and gaps.

August 14, 2024

Technology Risk & Compliance

Tech risk and compliance masterclass

Unlock tech risk management & compliance excellence. Master risk management, build robust frameworks, and foster cross-functional collaboration for long-term resilience.

August 07, 2024

Technology Risk & Compliance

Introducing OneTrust Compliance Automation

Join us as we explore OneTrust Compliance Automation, a holistic and fully integrated solution that streamlines and optimizes workflows, compliance, and attestation.

July 25, 2024

Data Discovery & Classification

Catch it live: See the all-new features in OneTrust's Spring Release and Post-TrustWeek recap

June 06, 2024

AI Governance

GRC strategies for effective AI Governance: OCEG research report

Download the full OCEG research report for a snapshot of what organizations are doing to govern their AI efforts, assess and manage risks, and ensure compliance with external and internal requirements.

May 22, 2024

Third-Party Risk

Streamline compliance with the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA)

Download our infographic to learn about the new DORA regulation, who needs to comply, and how OneTrust can help streamline the process.

April 29, 2024

Ethics Program Management

EthicsConnect: Risk - It’s not just for breakfast anymore

Join us for a deep dive into embedding privacy by design into the fabric of your business to promote the responsible use of data.

April 25, 2024

Technology Risk & Compliance

Rethinking risk assessments: Bridging the gap between best practices and action

Download our infographic to learn the main challenges faced during risk assessments, proven frameworks for assessing risks, and how to translate guidance into action.

March 07, 2024

Technology Risk & Compliance