By Chad Robbins, Chief Customer Officer, CLDigital
Why “Check-the-Box” Compliance Can’t Keep Up
Most organizations still run compliance as a series of snapshots:
- Annual or quarterly assessments
- Periodic attestations
- Evidence hunts before an audit or regulatory review
On paper, that model looks tidy. In practice, it’s completely out of sync with how modern risk works. Infrastructure is elastic, vendors change constantly, threats evolve hourly, and regulators are now asking how you operate in real time, not just what you documented last year.
Frameworks like the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) explicitly push firms toward ongoing ICT risk management, operational resilience testing, and third-party oversight, rather than one-off exercises. UK operational resilience rules similarly expect firms to identify important business services, set impact tolerances, and then map and test them in a way that reveals vulnerabilities before an incident hits.
Point-in-time compliance gives you a certificate.
Real-time compliance gives you confidence.
What “Real-Time Compliance” Actually Means
Real-time compliance is more than faster audits or prettier dashboards. At its core, it means:
- Continuous visibility into whether controls are operating as designed
- Automated detection of drift or failures the moment they occur
- Evidence captured as work happens, not weeks later
- Risk and compliance data tied to actual business services, dependencies, and vendors
Continuous control monitoring platforms already do this by collecting system data, automatically testing it against defined control requirements, and flagging failures as they happen.
In other words, compliance is no longer a quarterly event. It becomes a living process.
For CLDigital’s buyers, financial institutions, insurers, and highly regulated organizations, this is the difference between telling regulators you’re compliant and showing them, with live data, that you stay compliant.
Why Point-in-Time Compliance Fails Regulated Firms
For many risk and compliance teams, the legacy approach has three structural problems.
1. It’s blind to change
A control that worked in January might be misconfigured by June. A third-party vendor that passed due diligence last quarter might have since suffered a breach. Static risk registers and annual reviews don’t capture this kind of day-to-day drift.
Regulations like DORA explicitly require ongoing oversight of ICT risk, incident response, resilience testing, and critical third-party providers, activities that by nature must be refreshed and evidenced on an ongoing basis.
2. It overestimates control effectiveness
If your assessment process is a spreadsheet plus a workshop, your control ratings often reflect perception rather than performance.
Without continuous data, incident trends, KRI breaches, SLA violations, control test results, scores and RAG statuses can give leadership a false sense of security.
3. It exhausts your teams
The traditional model creates “compliance sprints” before audits or supervisory reviews:
- Evidence is scattered across email, shared drives, and spreadsheets
- Subject-matter experts are pulled into fire drills to prove what already happened
- Risk teams spend more time reconstructing history than improving the present
Continuous monitoring and automated evidence capture flip that model. Evidence collection becomes background noise rather than the main event, freeing people to focus on actual risk management.
The Regulatory Shift Toward Real-Time
The direction of travel from regulators is clear: ongoing resilience, not occasional paperwork.
- DORA requires robust ICT risk management, incident reporting, operational resilience testing, and oversight of ICT third-party risk, all designed to ensure that digital operations withstand disruption.
- UK FCA/PRA rules require firms to define important business services, set impact tolerances, map resources and dependencies to those services, and test whether they can remain within tolerance during severe but plausible scenarios.
- Continuous control monitoring is now called out explicitly in many GRC and cyber trends as a way to reduce manual effort, increase accuracy, and improve operational resilience.
If your evidence only updates at audit time, you’re out of sync with both risk and regulation.
What Real-Time Compliance Looks Like in Practice
For CLDigital’s audience, real-time compliance isn’t abstract. It touches real workflows, every day.
1. Integrated, live control monitoring
Instead of static control libraries, real-time compliance connects controls to:
- System configurations and log data
- Identity and access management
- Vendor performance and SLAs
- Incident and issue management records
Controls are automatically tested, continuously or at sensible frequencies, and exceptions are raised as soon as something drifts.
2. Compliance mapped to services, not just assets
Operational resilience guidance expects firms to understand how risks affect important business services, not just applications or infrastructure.
Real-time compliance platforms (including leading operational resilience software and best GRC software solutions) map:
- Risks → to controls
- Controls → to applications and vendors
- Applications/vendors → to business services and customer outcomes
This is the foundation that lets you answer questions like:
“If this control fails or this vendor goes down, what services are impacted, how long until customers feel it, and does that breach our impact tolerance?”
3. Continuous evidence, always audit-ready
Automation has changed how evidence is collected and retained. Instead of creating documentation once a year, continuous compliance monitoring:
- Captures evidence as activity occurs
- Stores it centrally for reuse across frameworks (DORA, ISO 22301, SOC 2, internal policies)
- Makes it easy to show regulators not just what your framework says, but how it operates day-to-day
This is especially powerful for organizations juggling multiple regulatory regimes and standards at once.
How Platforms Like CLDigital Enable Real-Time Compliance
Real-time compliance is not a spreadsheet problem. It’s a platform problem. The organizations that succeed tend to have:
- Unified data across risk, continuity, incidents, and vendors
- One place where risk registers, business continuity management software, incident management software, third-party risk management software, and operational resilience software all speak the same data language.
- Automated workflows and orchestration
- No-code configuration to trigger reviews, escalations, attestations, and approvals when specific risk or control conditions are met, rather than chasing responses manually.
- Context-aware analytics
- Dashboards that show not just control status, but how issues affect services, locations, customers, and financial impact.
- Scenario and testing integration
- Exercises, DR tests, and scenario simulations feeding into the same data model, closing the loop between “plan, test, learn, improve.”
When those elements come together, you move beyond traditional GRC software toward a genuinely connected risk management platform, one that can support continuous compliance across multiple frameworks without overwhelming people.
Making the Shift: From Static Compliance to Real-Time Oversight
Moving from point-in-time to real-time compliance doesn’t require a big-bang transformation. It’s a series of deliberate shifts:
- Start where the risk is highest
Focus continuous monitoring on your most critical services, vendors, or regulatory requirements. Financial services firms often begin with payments, trading, or core banking; healthcare organizations might focus on clinical systems or EHR availability. - Automate evidence for the controls that hurt the most
Identify the controls that create the biggest manual burden, recurring screenshots, ad hoc reports, repeated attestations—and automate data capture and validation around them. - Tie every control to a business service or outcome
If a control isn’t clearly linked to a service, customer impact, or regulatory expectation, leadership will struggle to care about it. Build that mapping into your resilience and enterprise risk management software, not just slideware. - Turn monitoring into decisions, not dashboards
Reporting that doesn’t change behavior is just decoration. Embed alerting, workflow, and structured responses so that when a control fails, a vendor breaches an SLA, or a tolerance is at risk, the right people are engaged with clear next steps.
Why Real-Time Compliance Is the Only Compliance That Matters
Regulators are asking harder questions. Customers and partners assume you are resilient, not just compliant. Boards want to see exposure in business terms, not just heatmaps.
Real-time compliance is how you:
- Prove that your controls are operating when it counts
- Translate technical and operational risk into strategic decisions
- Reduce audit fatigue while improving regulatory posture
- Build resilience that stands up to real incidents, not just to questionnaires
Point-in-time compliance will still exist on paper. Reports will still be filed. Certifications will still be issued.
But the organizations that manage risk best, and move fastest, will be the ones whose compliance posture updates as quickly as their environment does.
For those teams, compliance is no longer a periodic scramble. It becomes an always-on capability that underpins resilience, protects growth, and earns trust when it matters most.
