Teams managing compliance and regulatory requirements in organizations need to assure senior executives that they are actively managing the risks their organization wants to mitigate. To do this, organizations must put appropriate controls in place to meet compliance requirements and verify that those controls operate effectively over time. 

Compliance and internal audit teams often struggle to keep up with managing multiple security and privacy frameworks, documenting the status of security controls, addressing increased regulatory scrutiny, and using third-party technology to maintain compliance requirements. That’s where continuous controls monitoring comes in to help.

What is Continuous Controls Monitoring? 

Continuous controls monitoring (CCM) is an automated approach to tracking whether security and compliance controls are working as intended. CCM turns one-time control checks into an ongoing process to help organizations enforce an active cyber defense posture, ensure business continuity, and achieve continuous compliance.

CCM has many use cases across industries. In Financial Services, it exists as fraud monitoring and financial transaction monitoring. In Manufacturing, it’s used for quality and process control monitoring. Across industries, organizations are increasingly deploying CCM to address key control objectives in network and data security.

There are several approaches to CCM implementation. It can be as simple as turning on certain settings in the source operating system and using its built-in dashboards and reports. 

But if you want a more comprehensive CCM solution that monitors a wide range of controls across business domains, you’ll need a single repository to document and manage controls and gather evidence of their effectiveness. 

Choosing a dedicated continuous controls monitoring platform gives you a framework that’s built to test and monitor controls at scale. This type of system, commonly known as a compliance management platform, seamlessly integrates with common business applications across IT, Development, Security, HR, Sales, and Finance to pull relevant data about many types of controls into its platform for streamlined controls assessment and validation.

All in all, CCM is a key aspect of GRC programs that helps organizations improve their overall risk and compliance posture. 

The benefits of implementing Continuous Controls Monitoring 

Organizations that deploy CCM enjoy numerous benefits, such as:

Organizations that implement continuous controls monitoring can also maintain confidence that line managers and employees who operate technologies running key business processes are actively managing the risks that come with these processes. Examples include:

How is continuous controls monitoring different from traditional controls monitoring methods?

Continuous controls monitoring (CCM) differs from traditional controls monitoring methods in several key ways:

1. Real-time monitoring: CCM provides ongoing, real-time analysis of control effectiveness, allowing organizations to detect control failures as they arise, whereas traditional methods often rely on periodic assessments that can lead to a reactive security posture and gaps in oversight.
2. Automation: CCM uses automated tools and technologies to continuously assess internal controls, reducing the need for manual checks and the potential for human error. Traditional control monitoring typically involves manual processes that can be time-consuming and less efficient.
3. Risk management: With CCM, organizations can proactively manage risks by identifying weaknesses or failures in controls more quickly than with traditional monitoring, which may only highlight problems after they have caused issues.
4. Data-driven insights: Continuous monitoring generates valuable data that can be analyzed for trends and patterns over time, leading to better decision-making and strategic improvements compared to the more static insights gained from traditional methods.

CCM is about proactive risk management through real-time, automated processes that enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your compliance program.

How to set up a Continuous Controls Monitoring system 

Before setting up a CCM system, a few prerequisites need to be met:

1. Have a set of controls in place

Before you implement CCM, it’s important to identify the processes or controls that your organization already has in place. Oversight authorities may define some controls in your industry and you might borrow others from applicable industry control frameworks, such as COSO, COBIT 5 (for SOX compliance), NIST Cybersecurity Framework, ISO 27001, etc. You should know who (or which team) is responsible for each control process. 

2. Have a single source of truth for all controls

To have a monitoring system implies that you have a single place where you can see and manage all controls. Thus, you’ll need to have a technology platform that allows you to document all controls and categorize them based on key characteristics (for example, criticality, control type, and the risk it’s meant to address) – so a compliance or internal audit professional can easily select the set of controls they want to automatically test and monitor.  

3. Understand what evidence you need to validate control processes and how to generate that evidence

To set up CCM, complete the following steps. With the right continuous control monitoring tool, you can automate evidence collection, increase testing coverage, and maintain continuous visibility into control performance: 

1. Select and prioritize critical controls for continuous controls monitoring. Controls that make suitable candidates for CCM have the following traits:
   • They run at a high frequency (in near real-time, hourly, or daily)
   • The system that the control runs in generates structured, reasonably clean data about the control process (for example, a table with rows and cells) so an algorithm can scan the data and evaluate whether or not certain user-defined conditions are met
   • The evidence (data generated about the control process) can be automatically pulled into third-party software (for example, a compliance operations or GRC platform) and tested 
2. Define control validation objectives or goals. Specify and build automated tests with pass/fail criteria. Determine the process frequency to run the test. 
3. Set up processes to manage alarms, communicate, investigate, and correct the control weaknesses.