RegScale Named a Sample Vendor in Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for I&O Automation, 2026

RegScale has been named a Sample Vendor in the DevOps Continuous Compliance Automation (DCCA) category of the Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for I&O Automation, 2026. We believe the report by Chris Saunderson provides further recognition for RegScale in a market that’s just getting started.

Gartner notes that the “Heads of I&O driving automation initiatives can use this Hype Cycle to deliver these efficiencies, drive innovations, upskill their teams using AI, and optimize cost and value.” Although only Gartner subscribers can access the full report, we’ve summarized our main takeaways below.

DevOps Under Pressure

DevOps teams are under relentless pressure to deliver faster for the business. They are both an innovation engine and an indispensable operational backbone – perhaps pushing code updates several times per day. This is software that powers the business, handling sensitive data and driving critical processes.

All of which makes compliance an essential part of DevOps. In an ideal world, processes would be embedded as far left as possible to maintain seamless software delivery while ensuring problems are fixed before they can even make an impact on production systems. But the reality is different. Manual spreadsheets, reactive audits and human error slow down release cycles, and add cost, complexity and uncertainty. Security and compliance gaps emerge, exposing organizations to reputational and financial risk. Work is duplicated. And more time ends up being spent on compliance than innovation.

As Gartner states in its report: “Traditional compliance reporting, benchmarking, assessments, and remediation are increasingly too slow to support the needs of high-velocity digital business processes.”

These challenges will only worsen as regulations proliferate and organizations find that manual processes are unable to scale. In response, most will either slow development, or accept that their authorization documentation is out of date the minute code ships. Neither option is preferable going forward.

The Push for DCCA

Gartner explains where the market is heading in response. It states: “Integrating DevOps workflows into GRC platforms is necessary to ensure visibility into compliance levels. As cloud-native application architectures and development models become more pervasive, integrating compliance into the toolchain will become more expected.”

We believe the best way to integrate compliance into DevOps under a DCCA model is via compliance as code. Static compliance requirements are translated into standardized code, so they can be embedded into CI/CD pipelines. In this way, you can automatically test code for non-compliance just as you would check it for bugs before deployment.

It means issues are continuously detected and corrected before anything hits production. And organizations are in a constant state of audit readiness. The reduction in costs and manual work can be significant. One global telco used RegScale’s DCCA platform to save $1.8m and 2,000 person-hours in just the first year of deployment.

Gartner summarizes the benefits as follows: “DevOps continuous compliance automation (DCCA) tools help organizations achieve, sustain, and report on compliance as part of delivery pipelines and platforms. Enhance audit-readiness by automating the enforcement and assessment of compliance policies across application and infrastructure workflows. DCCA tools reduce the risk of compliance violations, which can result in fines, penalties, and reputational damage, and identify compliance gaps and security vulnerabilities early in development.”

Next Steps for I&O Leaders

For I&O leaders keen to realize the benefits of DCCA, the report has some useful recommendations. Gartner advises:

• “Optimize work, taking into account compliance requirements, don’t bolt them on afterward, which reduces effectiveness, efficiency, and increases costs.
• Ensure compliance controls and evidentiary data are understood and applied earlier in the development process.
• Implement an augmented continuous approach to prevent, detect, and correct audit findings, removing manual reporting activities.
• Evaluate vendor solutions using GenAI and agentic AI to enhance compliance automation for automated policy generation, continuous monitoring, or code remediation.
• Enable continuous measurement by deploying efficient policy checking to measure benchmarks, perform assessments, and manage the mitigation of findings in real time.
• Choose tools that integrate with your existing pipelines, GRC systems, security tools, and other relevant systems.”

How RegScale Accelerates the Journey to DCCA

We believe RegScale is well positioned to help organizations turn these recommendations into action.

Our compliance-as-code approach enables organizations to incorporate policies, controls, and audits directly into infrastructure and application code. It continuously collects evidence from cloud platforms, security tools, infrastructure-as-code, and development environments, automatically mapping it to the relevant controls and frameworks. This means issues are automatically remediated on a continuous basis during development rather than in a mad scramble the night before an audit.

RegScale also leverages AI in its ongoing mission to reduce manual effort and optimize GRC – such as automatic policy generation, evidence analysis and mapping, and remediation suggestions. Our platform connects via API to numerous third-party solutions including CI/CD platforms, cloud systems, vulnerability management and identity solutions, CMDBs, and SIEMs. It means customers can extract maximum value from their existing investments as they drive DCCA.

Adoption Is Set to Surge

Gartner estimates in its report that “market penetration” is “5% to 20% of target audience” for DCCA. That leaves a significant opportunity for organizations. Frameworks like FedRAMP 20x have shown that continuous controls monitoring and automation are the direction of travel. It’s time to start the journey.

Gartner, Hype Cycle for I&O Automation, 2026, Chris Saunderson, 8 July 2026.

Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.