Gathering evidence in a timely manner to support an audit can be a significant challenge due to manual, error-prone, and sometimes, distributed processes. If your business is subject to compliance requirements, preparing for an audit can cause significant lost productivity and disruption as a result. You might also have trouble applying traditional audit practices, which were originally designed for legacy on-premises systems, to your cloud infrastructure.

To satisfy complex and evolving sets of regulation and compliance standards, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), you’ll need to gather, verify, and synthesize evidence.

You’ll also need to constantly reevaluate how your AWS usage maps to those evolving compliance control requirements. To satisfy requirements you may need to show data encryption was active, and log files showing server configuration changes, diagrams showing application high availability, transcripts showing required training was completed, spreadsheets showing that software usage did not exceed licensed amounts, and more. This effort, sometimes involving dozens of staff and consultants, can last several weeks.

Available today, AWS Audit Manager is a fully managed service that provides prebuilt frameworks for common industry standards and regulations, and automates the continual collection of evidence to help you in preparing for an audit. Continuous and automated gathering of evidence related to your AWS resource usage helps simplify risk assessment and compliance with regulations and industry standards and helps you maintain a continuous, audit-ready posture to provide a faster, less disruptive preparation process.

Built-in and customizable frameworks map usage of your cloud resources to controls for different compliance standards, translating evidence into an audit-ready, immutable assessment report using auditor-friendly terminology. You can also search, filter, and upload additional evidence to include in the final assessment, such as details of on-premises infrastructure, or procedures such as business continuity plans, training transcripts, and policy documents.

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