Anti-patterns for continuous auditing

Inadequate audit trails: Not keeping comprehensive audit trails makes it difficult to track actions performed in your environment. This makes it harder to detect suspicious activity or understand the cause of issues when they occur. Use services like AWS CloudTrail to create a record of actions taken in your AWS environment.

Manual evidence review: Relying on manual processes to collect, aggregate, and review audit data can be error prone and can lead to inconsistencies. Manual review can be time-consuming and often cannot keep pace with the pace of development which leads to reduced ability to quickly respond to compliance issues. Instead, implement automated tools to continuously gather and analyze audit data. Use dashboards and alerts to give a real-time view of system compliance.

Viewing audits as a one-time event: Treating audits as periodic, isolated checks instead of a continuous process can result in significant gaps between audits. During this time, many compliance issues might go undetected. Embed continuous auditing practices into the development lifecycle, including regular, automated checks in pipelines and taking an event-driven approach to auditing. Internal auditors can be embedded within teams, or act as enabling teams, to provide just-in-time audit expertise during planning and development cycles.

Expecting auditors to track every feature: Anticipating that auditing teams will be able to keep up with the rapid pace of feature development and deployments while understanding the nuances of each change is an impractical expectation when practicing DevOps. The primary focus of the auditor should be on processes, controls, and patterns, rather than granular features. Shift the compliance responsibility closer to the source. Educate development teams on auditing requirements and best practices, empowering them to incorporate compliance into their development processes. Put detective, responsive, and preventive controls in place to enforce compliance where possible. This way, developers can produce features with built-in compliance, reducing the load on auditors and ensuring tighter compliance integration.

Overlooking developer training: Assuming that development teams automatically know compliance and auditing best practices without proper training might result in them unknowingly introducing vulnerabilities or non-compliant features. Regularly update training materials and hold sessions, ensuring development teams are well-versed in compliance requirements.