RegScale Recognized in the 2024 Gartner® Market Guide for DevOps Continuous Compliance Automation Tools Report for the Second Year in a Row

We are proud to announce that RegScale has been named as a 2024 Representative Vendor in the Gartner Market Guide for DevOps Continuous Compliance Automation Tools! In the guide by Daniel Betts, Manjunath Bhat, Chris Saunderson, Hassan Ennaciri, and George Spafford, 28 March 2024, Gartner recognized RegScale as a Representative Vendor in the Compliance Automation Tools in DevOps category.  

Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) leaders and Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) can leverage this guide to learn about the importance of investing in a compliance platform that seamlessly integrates with their current security, compliance, and DevOps tools and workflows to ensure comprehensive compliance across all development and delivery tasks. 

Although the Market Guide is available only to Gartner® clients, here are some highlights of the publication.  

The rise of continuous compliance automation in DevOps  

According to Gartner, “By  2026, 70% of enterprises will have integrated compliance as code into their DevOps toolchains, reducing risk management and improving lead time by at least 15%.” The research by Gartner further investigates the impact of compliance as code and compliance automation in the DevOps process.  

According to RegScale, as organizations become more ephemeral and cloud-based, as the regulatory landscape becomes more complex and burdensome, all while organizations build and deliver more software, it’s evident that compliance as code – if integrated into DevOps practices — could play a crucial role in supporting continuous compliance efforts. Traditional compliance and auditing processes often operate in silos, leading to fragmented workflows that hinder speed, agility, and security outcomes. This disjointed approach results in extensive manual efforts to assess, identify, remediate, and report compliance items in delivery activities, causing delays in product delivery cycles.  

Compliance automation and compliance as code offer a paradigm shift by advocating for the integration of compliance into the development and delivery pipelines. By automating regulatory compliance checks and evidence collection during the integration and build process, DevOps ensures compliance becomes an integral part of the development lifecycle. Developers are encouraged to be proactive in scanning for compliance issues, thus preventing delays in product delivery cycles. 

According to the Market Guide, Gartner® states additional benefits of compliance automation that include:  

• “Advanced auditing capabilities with real-time reporting — Having end-to-end visibility to audit data and compliance status at every phase of the life cycle eliminates time-costly impacts of refactoring to remediate findings. This also drastically reduces toil and costs associated with manually generating reports and collecting audit evidence data. 
  
• Defined templates for known compliance rules — Scale compliance by providing mapped controls to common regulatory frameworks, allowing automation to effectively implement those controls across the organization. 
  
• Persona-based insights — Provide tailored compliance insights based on the user’s persona and their area of focus. 
  
• Generative AI — Strengthen compliance by generating audit reports and controls from compliance documentation, and perform audit governance checks, providing improvements and remediation suggestions. 
  
• Enhanced detection techniques — Provide immediate feedback to aid with issue remediation. Techniques include infrastructure state scans and open-source software code, and configuration integrity checks. 
  
• Clearly defined access rights — Provide greater control, visibility, traceability and accountability. 
  
• Extensive integration and plug-ins — Integrate with existing security, compliance and DevOps tools to ingest, collect documentation and provide a unified view of the compliance posture of all products.”  

Overall, integrating compliance into DevOps practices enhances efficiency in assessments, management, and reporting of compliance controls and fosters a culture of continuous compliance. By incorporating compliance automation tools into their delivery pipelines, organizations can achieve fast, actionable feedback, build confidence in their compliance processes, and ensure seamless compliance throughout the development lifecycle. 

How to integrate compliance automation into the DevOps process?   

Gartner® provides three recommendations (and benefits) for integrating compliance automation, compliance as code, and controls monitoring into the DevOps toolchain: 

1. “Automate regulatory compliance checking and evidence collection for application delivery via verification of code during the integration and build process. The build pipeline should be the official point for compliance. 

2. Prevent compliance control checking delays to product delivery cycles by encouraging developers to be proactive and scan for compliance before code commit. 

3. Ensure audit success by leveraging a platform that automates and integrates with existing DevOps tools and processes, and provides real-time compliance status reporting and remediation capabilities.” 

“RegScale is proud to be recognized in the Gartner® report as a Representative Vendor for the second year in a row. In a cloud-based, mobile world, where there are no boundaries and assets themselves are ephemeral, current business processes today will be obsolete in the future. We believe that RegScale stands at the forefront of compliance automation by changing how organizations approach governance, risk, and compliance (GRC),” said RegScale Co-Founder and CEO Travis Howerton. “RegScale is purpose-built to support NIST OSCAL with all OSCAL-native functionality to meet those needs while maintaining speed. By integrating RegScale’s OSCAL-native platform with built-in AI capabilities into their DevOps toolchain, organizations balance speed and risk, enforce policy, produce real-time reporting, and continuously remediate issues during the development process. With a commitment to innovation, we continuously evolve our capabilities to meet modern enterprises’ security and compliance needs now and in the future.”

This is the sixth time RegScale has been mentioned by Gartner in the last year. RegScale was first recognized as a Sample Vendor in four Hype Cycle™ reports in the Continuous Compliance Automation category in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Agile and DevOps, 27 July; Hype Cycle for Cyber Risk Management, July 25; Hype Cycle for I&O Automation, July 14 and Hype Cycle for Site Reliability Engineering, July 17. RegScale was also recognized in the 2023 Gartner Market Guide to GRC Tools for Assurance Leaders (available for Gartner® subscribers only) by Lauren Kornutick, Zachary Ginsburg, Elizabeth Makris, 24 August 2023. This was the first GRC market guide published by Gartner.  

Ready to learn more? Schedule a demo to see the power of RegScale’s compliance-as-code and AI-powered compliance automation platform.   

Gartner subscribers can access the market guide in the link below:   

Gartner, Market Guide for DevOps Continuous Compliance Automation Tools, 28 March, 2024, by Daniel Betts, Manjunath Bhat, Chris Saunderson, Hassan Ennaciri, George Spafford.    

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