Introducing Qualys Policy Audit, the New Standard for Audit Readiness
Do you know how audit ready you really are?
What if you could answer that question with confidence—at any moment, across every system, for every framework that matters to your business?
In today’s rapidly shifting regulatory landscape, audits are no longer a periodic event—they’re a continuous requirement. Whether it’s SOX, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, DORA, or any number of evolving global frameworks, organizations are under constant pressure to demonstrate that they’re secure, compliant, and in control.
Audit readiness has become more than a documentation exercise—it’s now a core pillar of operational risk management. While security vulnerabilities can often be prioritized and remediated over time, audit failures can have immediate and far-reaching consequences. They can halt critical business functions, delay entry into new markets, postpone strategic product releases, and erode customer trust.
That’s why modern compliance programs must go beyond checklists. Today, audit readiness is a business-critical capability—one that enables organizations to move faster, stay competitive, and operate with confidence amid rising regulatory expectations.
Staying audit ready amid a growing regulatory landscape
Staying audit ready is more important than ever; without automation, it’s a significant challenge. According to Coalfire’s 2023 Compliance Report, organizations can spend between 10,000 to 20,000 hours per audit, with nearly 50% of compliance failures stemming from human error, such as applying the wrong fix or misconfiguring a setting. Regulatory trends are shifting away from point-in-time compliance to continuous compliance requirements. Recent examples of this shift include PCI DSS 4.0, DORA, and updates to FISMA, all of which emphasize the need for ongoing monitoring, evidence collection, and real-time control validation. One of the most significant challenges enterprises face today is managing multiple, often conflicting, regulatory frameworks. As organizations expand globally and operate in increasingly regulated industries, they must adhere to a diverse set of compliance mandates. In 2023, Coalfire estimated that nearly 98% of global organizations are now subject to multiple regulatory frameworks, with 70% subject to 5 or more. This regulatory burden significantly increases the complexity of compliance management.
Each regulatory standard—whether it’s GDPR in Europe, CCPA in California, or PCI DSS for payment card security—has its own set of requirements, reporting obligations, and timelines. This creates a fragmented compliance landscape where organizations must keep track of varying mandates, definitions of “compliance,” and enforcement practices.
Top challenges with audit readiness
- Lack of continuous improvement in audit readiness
Without a continuous, real-time view of audit readiness, organizations often enter audits without clear visibility into their compliance status. This lack of awareness creates uncertainty, as teams are left scrambling, unsure whether they’ll pass or fail until the audit is in full swing. - Labor-intensive evidence and control mapping.
Auditors typically sample controls for evidence, and this causes a last-minute scramble to find the right IT stakeholders and run manual scripts that cause a lot of back and forth, increasing costs as you have to pay auditors to wait while you collect evidence. Not knowing the exact gap analysis of what’s needed to pass an audit means it becomes hard to plan for time and cost for work needed to get to a compliant state. - Lack of audit controls prioritization and implementation
When organizations lack a clear understanding of which controls are most critical or which ones auditors focus on most, resources can be misallocated. Even when policies are defined centrally, controls are often implemented inconsistently across assets, regions, or environments—leading to gaps in audits and findings. - Fragmented and siloed tools
Security, IT, and compliance teams often operate in silos, using different tools and terminologies. When failing controls aren’t properly integrated into centralized systems like ticketing platforms, organizations end up managing remediation through scattered spreadsheets and endless email threads. This fragmented approach creates inefficiencies, delays, and difficulty in tracking and testing the resolution of issues across different teams. - Manual and incomplete reports
Generating audit reports manually is a labor-intensive process that requires ongoing effort from already overburdened teams. From addressing compliance findings to remediating vulnerabilities, this work is prone to human error and delays. Incomplete or poorly structured reports not only increase organizational risks but also make it harder to secure necessary remediation budgets or convince auditors of compliance progress. - Lack of remediation automation
Lack of automation in remediation causes repeated work on the same control due to a loss of information in translation to IT teams; also, control values tend to revert back to failing values due to system updates and changes.
Introducing Qualys Policy Audit: Stay Audit Ready Continuously
In response to these challenges, Qualys Policy Audit sets a new benchmark for how organizations achieve and maintain continuous audit readiness.
Designed for modern security and compliance teams, Qualys Policy Audit delivers automation at every step—compliance monitoring across 450+ technologies and 90+ global frameworks, automated evidence collection, proactive gap analysis, and streamlined audit workflows. With Qualys, enterprises can meet evolving regulatory demands with less effort, fewer errors, and greater confidence—while reducing audit preparation time and costs.
Continuous Audit Readiness
By continuous and automated evidence collection, Policy Audit automatically maps the evidence to regulatory frameworks relevant to your environment. Everything is automatically collected, so there’s no more scrambling or worrying about human errors, and it lets you instantly stay ahead of shifting regulatory frameworks.
Proactive Gap Analysis
By identifying gaps early, you can resolve issues before they escalate, avoiding last-minute surprises that disrupt audits and delay business operations. This forward-looking approach helps you always maintain alignment with regulatory requirements so you are always audit ready.
Streamline Audit Operations
With automated audit workflows, you can streamline operations by automatically sending the right info to the right people. From discovery to resolution, everything flows seamlessly with ITSM platform integration. Additionally, audit risks are communicated directly to their GRC tools, making the whole process more efficient.
Prioritize Compliance Risk with Audit Findings
Policy audit takes the guesswork and manual effort out of risk prioritization by integrating tightly with TruRisk – automatically mapping audit findings to data privacy risk. This allows organizations to contextualize their understanding of audit findings to properly prioritize remediation and response efforts based on: Business and Mission Impact, Asset Exposure, and Threat Exposure.
By doing this, Qualys helps organizations prioritize compliance gaps based on audit findings, reduce exposure to regulatory fines, and focus remediation efforts toward audit readiness.
Effortless Audit Readiness with Automated Reporting
Policy Audit provides audit-ready reports for auditors for any frameworks from single evidence collection. It provides audit-ready reporting with cross mapping to 90+ benchmarks and frameworks, including CIS, NIST, FedRAMP, GDPR, PCI DSS 4.0, and more.
With this, auditors will have a unified view of technical controls in a unified manner, and you can also generate custom reports for on-demand audits. Policy Audit ensures that you are continuously prepared with these reports, reduces audit costs, and frees up manual resources.
Policy Audit helps organizations transition from point-in-time compliance to continuous audit readiness. By automating evidence collection, performing gap analysis, and aligning compliance risk with security risk, enterprises can meet evolving regulatory requirements while optimizing audit processes and reducing costs.
Simplify audit readiness and compliance. Try Qualys Policy Audit today.
Custom Checks
With Policy Audit, users can now easily address their unique compliance requirements with custom scripts, ensuring full compliance with external and internal policies. As with changing requirements for regulatory frameworks, they can easily adapt to evolving regulations and create their own custom checks, custom QIDs and remediations, and close compliance gaps proactively.
Fix the Audit Findings with ‘Audit Fix’
Simplify the remediation process by creating automated remediation jobs and accelerating timelines for closing critial gaps. Audit Fix empowers security teams to maintain system hardening and to eliminate critical findings that could be associated with emerging threats, such as new ransomware attacks. With a pre-defined library of out-of-the-box remediation scripts, enterprises can tailor the scripts according to their needs and address audit gaps before they become audit issues and further streamline audit readiness.
Only by automating evidence collection, accelerating gap analysis, and aligning compliance risk with real security risk can organizations break free from outdated, point-in-time compliance practices and keep pace with today’s regulatory demands. Frameworks like PCI DSS 4.0, DORA, and FISMA are raising the bar—expecting continuous visibility, not periodic snapshots. Yet many teams still rely on manual processes that are slow, error-prone, and resource-intensive.
Qualys Policy Audit makes continuous audit readiness achievable—replacing checklists with automation, manual reviews with real-time insights, and uncertainty with confidence. The result: reduced audit fatigue, fewer compliance failures, and lower operational costs.
Simplify compliance. Stay always audit ready.
Join us for the launch webinar and learn more about how Qualys Policy Audit can help you stay audit ready.