Qualys Unveils Policy Audit with Enhanced Efficiency for Continuous Audit Readiness

Enterprises are grappling with an increasing compliance burden, with nearly 70%* of service organizations subject to at least six frameworks or more regulatory mandates that stretch resources and drive-up costs. Misconfigurations further complicate compliance, often leading to non-compliance and regulatory penalties. Time-consuming tasks like auditing, reporting, and system remediation are prone to human error, underscoring the urgent need for a more efficient, automated approach to managing compliance challenges.

"Integrating Qualys Policy Audit into our workflows has transformed how we manage compliance. The seamless collaboration between teams, combined with real-time visibility across multiple mandates, has streamlined our operations and enabled proactive risk management. It's a game-changer for audit readiness," noted Sandeep Khanna, CISO at UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India).

Qualys Policy Audit helps organizations avoid security breaches and audit failures by automatically mapping evidence to frameworks like PCI DSS 4.0, DORA, NIST, CMMC and FedRAMP. It includes comprehensive coverage across 450 technologies, over 1,000 out-of-the-box policies and more than 90 frameworks, ensuring continuous compliance and audit readiness while minimizing the risk of audit failures. Policy Audit delivers:

Continuous Audit Readiness: Policy Compliance automates continuous evidence collection, minimizes human error, and helps monitor audit gaps with a real-time view of organizations' compliance posture. By reducing audit failure rate by up to 95%, it helps organizations proactively mitigate the risk of fines and penalties, and ensures they are always audit ready.
Reduced Risk Exposure: Policy Audit leverages Qualys TruRisk to automatically map compliance and data privacy risks. It also identifies and prioritizes critical misconfigurations based on business impact and asset and threat exposure to show which failures matter most, where they're most widespread, and how they impact multiple mandates. This enables organizations to prioritize fixes based on risk.
Streamlined Audit Operations: Automated ITSM workflows bridge siloed teams, ensuring the correct information reaches the right people quickly. Seamless integration with GRC tools enhances visibility and streamlines compliance tracking and risk management, while automated remediation workflows speed remediation efforts and reduce breach exposure.
Audit-Ready Reporting: Multiple reports are automatically generated from a single data collection, leveraging 90+ pre-mapped mandates to easily monitor compliance trends risk levels and mandate adherence. These customizable audit-ready reports for executives and stakeholders streamline on-demand audits and ensure compliance and reduce audit costs by 50%.

Introducing Audit Fix

To further mitigate breach exposure, Qualys is also introducing Audit Fix as an optional but powerful addition to Policy Audit. Audit Fix allows users to proactively repair audit findings before they escalate into compliance issues using a library of pre-defined, out-of-the-box scripts and golden policies that integrate into CI/CD pipelines. Customizable remediation workflows integrated into Policy Audit help to significantly reduce breach exposure and accelerate continuous compliance.

– Availability

Qualys Policy Audit will be available in Q2.