RegScale is Recognized as a Sample Vendor for DevOps Continuous Compliance Automation category in the Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for I&O Automation, 2024 report

We are thrilled to announce that – for the second year in a row – RegScale has been recognized as a Sample Vendor for the DevOps Continuous Compliance Automation category in the Gartner Hype Cycle for I&O Automation, 2024. Published on July 26, 2024, by Chris Saunderson and Cameron Haight, this Gartner report highlights that, “Automation is key to infrastructure and operations delivering greater value, efficiency and agility. This Hype Cycle will help I&O leaders looking to deliver these efficiencies and innovations, upskill their staff and optimize costs and value.” 

Automation: The Key to I&O Transformation

Automation is a transformative force for I&O leaders, empowering them to deliver improved speed to market, agility, security, and compliance risk management. As organizations focus on optimizing service costs and enhancing value, investments in automation have become imperative. The Hype Cycle report underscores the role of generative AI (GenAI) in boosting productivity and transforming automation practices. Tools like code-writing assistants accelerate the development of automation templates, playbooks, rules, and other artifacts, while innovations such as autonomous agents introduce a hybrid workforce combining human and AI capabilities.

(Check out how RegML Author writes for you control implementation statements based on control requirements.)

What is DevOps Continuous Compliance Automation?

According to Gartner, ”Organizations adopt agile, DevOps, DevSecOps, and platform engineering struggle to quickly demonstrate compliance requirements across workflows.”  

We believe that RegScale’s inclusion in the DevOps Continuous Compliance Automation category reflects our commitment to addressing this challenge. Our Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM) platform consistently enforces guardrails, identifies policy gaps, and audits security and compliance throughout product and platform delivery life cycles.

The Significance of DevOps Continuous Compliance Automation (DCCA)

With evolving regulatory changes, the practice of DevOps faces an ever-expanding array of compliance requirements. These requirements now extend beyond traditional financial and privacy mandates to include cybersecurity and government regulations. Continuous compliance automation tools are essential for aligning with these diverse regimes, enabling organizations to seamlessly integrate compliance into their CI/CD pipelines. 
 
As stated by Gartner, “Continuous compliance automation tools in DevOps enable organizations to achieve and report on compliance as part of their delivery pipelines. These tools allow automated assessment of security and compliance policies as part of application delivery workflows in secure, change-managed toolchains, and for the efficient generation of audit reports and publishing to audit consumers.” 

Key Drivers of Adoption

According to Gartner these are the drivers for adoption: 

• “As organizations face an increasing number of regulatory obligations and more stringent reporting and enforcement, automating compliance will become even more valuable in maximizing flow. 
• Additional compliance requirements continue to be added and require support with limited delay. 
• Compliance activities are increasingly executed through automated testing, which delivers increased efficiency for developers and reduces the risk of compliance audit failures. 
• Multiple DevOps toolchains as part of a DevOps initiative often all require compliance insights and controls. 
• As cloud-native application architectures and development models become more pervasive, integrating compliance into the toolchain will become more feasible and common. 
• Compliance reporting, benchmarking and assessments are often manual and slow.”

The Complexities of Implementing DevOps Continuous Compliance Automation

Obstacles stated by Gartner are as follows –

• “Failure to engage with compliance and security subject matter experts (SMEs) early in the development life cycle can lead to problems such as poor understanding of policies and their effective implementation. 
• DCCA tools require a formal change-controlled, secure DevOps toolchain to enable effective auditing. 
• A lack of rule-set understanding and consistent implementation can be an impediment to DCCA. Failure to consistently involve organizational compliance teams in implementation leads to a failure in delivering maximum value. 
• Poorly implemented DCCA presents a business risk. If it is assumed that by implementing DCCA, delivered software becomes compliant without additional effort, organizations will face increased risk of compliance failure.”

Recommendations for Success

To fully leverage the benefits of DevOps Continuous Compliance Automation, Gartner recommends organizations to: 

• “Collaborate on design, implementation and ongoing strategy with key stakeholders, including internal audit, compliance and security. 
• Adhere to compliance, governance and security requirements while creating a leaner operating environment. 
• Implement a “shift-left” approach to ensure compliance controls and evidentiary data are understood and applied earlier in the development process. 
• Implement automated compliance checks at every phase of the pipeline, demonstrating a “shift-secure” approach. 
• Provide a continuous approach to prevent, detect and correct audit failures, and remove manual reporting activities. 
• Enable efficient compliance policy checking to measure benchmarks, perform assessments and report on compliance policy controls.”

By following these recommendations, organizations can harness the full potential of automation to enhance their I&O operations and achieve continuous compliance. 

At RegScale, we are thrilled to be recognized in the Gartner Hype Cycle for I&O Automation, 2024. In our opinion, organizations using RegScale’s platform achieve extreme, proactive risk management and cost savings. Shift-left forward to continuing our journey alongside our clients as they navigate the complexities of modern compliance landscapes. 

What’s next? We invite I&O leaders to shift left security by leveraging RegScale’s compliance as code/OSCAL-native platform (Open Security Controls Assessment Language) to automate every control lifecycle phase. Become always audit-ready and generate self-updating paperwork that integrates compliance as code into the CI/CD pipelines, speeds certifications, reduces costs, and future-proofs security posture.

Only Gartner members can access the full report (For Gartner subscribers only): 

Gartner, Hype Cycle for I&O Automation, 2024, Chris Saunderson, Cameron Haight 26 July 2024 
 *Gartner Methodologies, Gartner Hype Cycle 

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