Do You Need Automated Evidence Collection for Your First SOC 2 Audit?

Let’s say the cost of a compliance program is worth $12,000 per year. What is the cost?

What it replaces will decide the answer.

If $12,000 can be used to eliminate hundreds of hours of repetitive evidence gathering in the complex technological world that could be worth investing. If a company of seven could manually gather the same information in only a few hours each month, the amount will be different.

That’s a useful method of looking for the best Vanta alternative. Identifying the platform with the most advanced features isn’t the first step. Ask how many hours and time these tools can help save your company.

Automated Manufacturing is a Break-Even Point

Automating compliance isn’t necessarily good or bad. Scale changes its value. Imagine a company that is growing with multiple cloud environments as well as numerous applications. The manual process of collecting evidence can be a significant operational burden. Integrations that automate monitoring systems and gather evidence could easily justify their cost.

Imagine a business with 10 people who are preparing to go through its initial SOC 2 audit. The system may be compact, and the evidence collection could remain manageable without extensive automation.

It is important to know the difference when you are evaluating Vanta pricing. The capabilities of an advanced platform are amazing, but they are only useful for organizations that require them.

Compare Architecture And Not Just Brands

A search for Vanta vs Drata can quickly become a feature-by-feature exercise. Both are well-established compliance platforms built around automation and integrations, so looking at their supported frameworks as well as integrations, service agreements, and individual quotes are useful for businesses seeking that approach.

It’s important to choose an additional thing before you do. Do you want to use a software that can be integrated into your compliance system? Some businesses prefer continuous monitoring, automated evidence collection, and automated evidence collection. Others prefer to present evidence by themselves, especially when the volume of work is low.

Vanta Competitors Don’t All Follow the Same Model

A number of well-known Vanta competitors compete within an identical category that is focused on automation. On the market, there are platforms with a simpler design that are more focused on organization rather instead of connectivity.

CertAssist belongs to the latter group. It was developed by compliance consultants and internal auditors, CertAssist organizes framework controls within a single workspace. It provides editable policy and evidence guidelines, and lets auditors review submitted evidence via the use of read-only access.

It doesn’t set up agents or connect to the infrastructure system. Customers can upload their own evidence.

Consideration should be given to the system access.

It is apparent that removing integrations could have disadvantages. One must gather evidence manually.

It also eliminates integration setup and this means that the compliance application does not require connections to the company’s operational environment.

The designs of either are not superior to the other. The relevant question is which choice is best for your organization.

CertAssist is targeted at companies that have between five and 200 employees and provides pricing information instead of having a sales conversation. The initial price listed for CertAssist is $225 monthly instead of a regular $375.

Let Complexity Have Its Place

What is required of a startup with 10 employees aren’t necessarily identical to those of an organization with 100 or 500 workers.

Although compliance is easy an easy platform can make sense. When systems, employees frameworks, and evidence requirements expand, the economics may ultimately favor more automation. This is a much better approach to buy compliance software to let complexity earn its place.

Don’t buy fifty different integrations because they seem impressive on the chart of comparison. They’re worth the cost when doing the tasks they are replacing is more costly than doing them manually.