Audits are an important part of maintaining compliance and proving your organization’s commitment to security and data protection. But for many organizations, the process can feel like an endless cycle of readiness work, evidence collection, and stress—leading to what’s known as audit fatigue. 

In this blog, we’ll explore what audit fatigue is, its common causes, and actionable strategies to mitigate it.

What is audit fatigue?

Audit fatigue refers to the frustration, redundancy, and operational burden that organizations often experience when faced with frequent or overlapping audits or assessments. It’s a common challenge for businesses operating in highly regulated industries or handling sensitive data. These businesses are usually required or expected to demonstrate compliance with multiple frameworks and regulations to provide assurance that they have achieved a baseline of security and are capable of protecting sensitive data.   

For example, almost 70% of service organizations need to demonstrate compliance with at least six different frameworks across information security and data privacy.

Typically, organizations that take a manual approach to compliance experience audit fatigue as stakeholders across departments and teams are pulled away from core activities again and again to support repetitive, tedious compliance tasks such as collecting evidence. 

Symptoms of audit fatigue include:

• Strained resources
• Burnout among employees
• Increased human error
• Missed deadlines 
• Decreased compliance readiness
• Lack of security culture

When left unaddressed, audit fatigue can impact morale, productivity, and your organization’s ability to meet regulatory requirements. It can also make your organization more vulnerable to cyber risks, insider threats, and data breaches.

The primary causes of audit fatigue

Several factors contribute to audit fatigue, but they often boil down to the three key issues below.

Frequent audits

Organizations that comply with multiple standards, such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, CMMC, and more, may need to undergo multiple audits annually or even more often to maintain compliance. Managing these audits can be time-consuming and resource-intensive.

An audit for a single framework requires you to establish an audit timeline, create and distribute policies for employee review, collect evidence, answer any follow-up requests or questions from the auditor, remediate any deficiencies, and more. Completing these activities not just once, but on a recurring basis, can take up a significant percentage of time for the individual or team responsible for compliance. 

Manual processes

In Hyperproof’s 2024 IT Compliance Benchmark Report, 81% of compliance professionals said they are burdened with administrative tasks and spend on average 30% or more of their time at work on manual processes. 

If your compliance program consists of manual processes, then you’ll have to rely on spreadsheets, emails, and scattered documentation to get audit-ready. These inefficient and disparate tools not only make audit preparation tedious and time-consuming — they also create bottlenecks, increase stress and complexity, and introduce human error. This makes it more difficult to build, maintain, and scale a compliance program with manual processes alone.

Duplicate work resulting from a lack of visibility 

Without a unified platform to manage controls, evidence, and remediation tasks, organizations lack visibility into the process and efforts made by various teams to get compliant and audit-ready. This typically results in duplicate efforts across audits, leading to frustration and wasted resources.

6 ways to mitigate audit fatigue 

Below are five practical strategies to ease the burden of audits and maintain compliance with confidence.

1. Invest in compliance automation

Compliance automation platforms like Secureframe simplify the audit process by centralizing tasks, evidence, and controls in one place and automating workflows for evidence collection, risk assessments, policy management, and more to make them more efficient, reliable, and scalable. This technology improves visibility into your security and compliance posture and reduces the amount of manual work required to get and stay audit-ready.

2. Automate evidence collection

Rather than require someone to manually dig through files, emails, and logs to collect evidence or email colleagues from across the organization to send them files or screenshots, an automation tool can streamline the collection of audit evidence by connecting directly to your tech stack. It pulls the necessary data from various sources, compiles it, maps it to relevant compliance requirements and controls, and keeps everything up-to-date, often in real-time. This significantly reduces manual effort and ensures data is accurate and up-to-date.

Having this centralized, single source of truth for your security compliance data will not only save you time and streamline the process of collecting and transferring evidence to your auditor — it will also make you more effective by enabling you to focus on areas where you’re not secure or compliant rather than just compiling evidence.

Say goodbye to audit fatigue with Secureframe

Secureframe is designed to help organizations overcome audit fatigue by streamlining compliance management and audit readiness. Our platform automates evidence collection and other compliance workflows for the most security frameworks out-of-the-box, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, HIPAA, NIST 800-171, CMMC, and more than 40 others, ensuring organizations can quickly and easily get audit-ready and stay compliant with evolving requirements.

With Secureframe, you can:

• Automate tedious manual tasks like evidence collection to speed up audit readiness
• Gain expert guidance from compliance professionals to ensure you’re audit-ready
• Use AI to automate the process of remediating failing controls, completing risk and vendor assessments, creating and editing policies, answering security questionnaires and more
• Continuously monitor your controls for year-round audit readiness
• Automatically see how the controls and tests you already have in place for one framework map to other in-demand frameworks
• Get real-time insights into your compliance status with our monitoring dashboard

As a result of these and other capabilities, Secureframe users report a range of benefits, including:

• 86% said reduced time and effort maintaining compliance
• 77% said faster and easier audit preparation
• 81% said audits are completed 25% or more faster, with 35% saying audits are completed in less than half the time

Don’t let audit fatigue hold your organization back. To learn how you can use Secureframe to focus on growing your business while staying compliant with confidence, request a demo.