Continuous Compliance Should Be a Revenue Strategy, Not an Engineering Tax

Written By Mel Shakir

Continuous compliance means that at any moment, an organization can produce realtime trustworthy, verifiable, auditor-ready evidence that proves its controls are operating as intended.

  • Not stale data from the last audit.

  • Not something assembled after a 12-week scramble.

  • Not hundreds of screenshots stitched together at the eleventh hour.

But continuously—as part of the system itself.

To get there, two things must happen:

  • Evidence collection must shift from humans to pipelines.

  • Controls must be validated in real time, not during an audit “season.”

This is easy to say. Hard to do. Nearly impossible today for most teams.

In this article, I’ll focus on SDLC compliance, as it’s relevant to nearly every company in the age of software and smart systems. I’ll break down:

  • Why audits waste hundreds of hours

  • Why GRC tools only cover ~60% of what matters

  • Why the SDLC is still the biggest evidence gap

  • Why FedRAMP demands real pipeline-native proof

  • And how TestifySec is making continuous compliance a reality—not a slogan

Why compliance audits are such a waste of resources

It’s audit season… which, for most organizations, means stopping important work and diving into a just-in-time evidence collection scramble: screenshots, exports, logs, attestations.

If you've lived this, you know the drill:

  • 4–16 week audit cycles

  • Hundreds of hours lost to interviews

  • Hundreds of screenshots gathered manually

  • Feature freezes while teams hunt for evidence

Audit season is nothing short of periodic chaos—and most importantly, a total waste of productivity.

Why?

1.  A lot of evidence today is ephemeral

Ephemeral environments–SDLC build environments with short-lived containers, Git references, and runtime configs disappear quickly. You can’t screenshot your way into historical accuracy.

2. Employees aren’t compliance historians

Every hour employees inadvertently spend as screenshot hunters, they’re not doing anything useful for the business.

3. Auditors require traceability, not claims

Regulations like, FedRAMP, for example, requires verifiable, source-linked evidence—proof that ties back to:

  • Git commits

  • CI/CD runs

  • Signed artifacts

  • Registry logs

  • Policy evaluations

A screenshot is not a control. A PDF is not a chain of custody. A Jira ticket is not traceability.

4. Manual evidence is always incomplete and inconsistent

Even well-run teams fail to capture everything. Humans forget. Pipelines drift. Environment configurations change.

Continuous compliance is impossible if evidence collection relies on discipline instead of automation.

Where Continuous Compliance Breaks Down: The Evidence Gap

Tools like Vanta, Drata , and Secureframe transformed corporate IT compliance. They automated policy management, vendor questionnaires, access reviews, and cloud controls.

But these tools explicitly do not reach into ephemeral, fast-changing SDLC environments.

This creates a massive blind spot.

More than 40% of FedRAMP-required evidence comes from CI/CD pipelines, code repositories, and build systems—areas GRC platforms cannot see.

This includes:

  • Software component inventory (NIST 800-53 CM-8)

  • Signed components & provenance (CM-14, SR-3, SR-4)

  • Build attestations & supply chain metadata

  • SBOMs

  • Kubernetes & IaC-level configuration evidence

  • Audit logs generated from code pathways

  • Enforcement of admission policies requiring signed images

And more.

This is the heart of the continuous compliance challenge:

The SDLC is dynamic, distributed, and fragmented across dozens of tools. Evidence is ephemeral, and collecting it in real time requires serious engineering effort.

Traditional compliance tools were never designed to capture it.

Why This Is Painful for Both Auditors and Engineers

Auditors

They need reliable, reproducible, tamper-resistant evidence. When they don’t get it, they:

  • Reject system security plans (SSP)

  • Request endless clarifications

  • Delay authorization to operate (ATO) timelines

  • Trigger re-testing cycles

This is why traditional paths to FedRAMP take 12–18 months and cost millions.

Engineers

Engineers want to ship products, not manage documentation debt.

Evidence hunts:

  • Cause feature freezes

  • Interrupt sprint cycles

  • Create enormous context switching

Continuous compliance was supposed to reduce friction. Instead, it created new friction.

Why FedRAMP (and Others) Mandate Real-Time Evidence

FedRAMP controls like:

  • CM-8 (Component Inventory)

  • CM-14 (Signed Components)

  • SR-3 (Supply Chain Controls)

  • SR-4 (Provenance)

require evidence directly from products, software pipelines, signing systems, or build infrastructure.

Why? Because modern software supply chain attacks target the entire lifecycle—not just the data center.

SolarWinds, CodeCov, xz-utils… these weren’t misconfigured S3 buckets. They were upstream compromises.

Regulators now understand:

If you can't prove how software was built, you can’t secure it.

Continuous compliance isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the foundation of security, trust, and governance—the things regulators, boards, and customers care about.

Why Most Automation Falls Short

Even advanced CI observability, artifact signing, or SBOM tools fail to deliver continuous compliance because they are not compliance systems.

They:

  • Produce point-in-time data

  • Don’t map to NIST 800-53 controls

  • Don’t store or correlate evidence across systems

  • Don’t generate auditor-ready SSP documentation

  • Don’t produce provenance chains

  • Don’t integrate with GRC workflows

  • Don’t tie evidence back to Git references and control IDs

Continuous Compliance needs automation and interpretation.

The Shift: From Manual Evidence to Pipeline-Native Evidence

This is where TestifySec is breaking new ground.

TestifySec automates the collection of SDLC-level, pipeline-native, cryptographically verifiable evidence—precisely the 40% blind spot traditional GRC tools cannot reach.

This includes:

  • Container image signatures via Witness/Sigstore

  • Attestation signatures via Witness and SigStore

  • Admission controller enforcement events

  • Signature verification logs from registries

  • SBOMs and provenance metadata

  • IaC / Kubernetes / workflow configs

  • Audit paths linking everything to Git commit SHA

Controls like CM-14 (Signed Components) can be 80% automated, with TestifySec collecting evidence continuously and mapping it to NIST 800-53 controls.

And critically:

  • AI generates the SSP from real config & code

  • Evidence maps to controls with one click

  • Auditors can independently verify the traceability

  • Developers don’t change anything, they keep shipping code

This is continuous compliance in practice, not theory.

Continuous Compliance: The New Reality

With SDLC-native evidence automation:

  • Developers write code

  • Pipelines generate attestations

  • Evidence is stored automatically

  • Proof is available before the auditor asks

  • SSPs stay fresh, not stale

  • Audits become verification events, not scavenger hunts

This is the future FedRAMP, DoD, and state frameworks are pushing toward, because it is the only viable way to secure modern software supply chains.

Compliance as a Revenue Engine, Not Engineering Overhead

Continuous compliance isn’t achieved by trying harder. It’s achieved by creating systems where evidence is a byproduct of development—not a byproduct of human effort.

For too long, compliance has been treated as a tax on engineering—a periodic drain on developer time, productivity, and morale. But that mindset misses the larger shift happening in the market.

Continuous compliance isn’t just about passing audits. It’s about unlocking revenue.

It’s the key to:

  • Selling into government, healthcare, energy, and financial services

  • Meeting the rising bar for software supply chain security

  • Winning enterprise deals that demand real-time evidence, not last-minute screenshots

  • Building trust through verifiable provenance and governance

  • Reducing the operational drag that slows releases and hurts velocity

This is why continuous compliance must evolve from a defensive measure into a strategic growth accelerator. And why the future belongs to companies that produce pipeline-native, cryptographically verifiable, always-on evidence—proof generated directly from their SDLC, not from developers’ nights and weekends.

By automating the 40% of compliance inside the pipeline—not in spreadsheets or policy documents—we transform compliance from a burden into a competitive advantage, from an engineering tax into a market-entry strategy, and from a point-in-time scramble into a continuous, audit-ready posture.

The companies that embrace this shift won’t just navigate FedRAMP and regulatory frameworks more smoothly—they’ll move faster, win more enterprise business, and scale into markets their competitors can’t reach.

Continuous compliance isn’t overhead. It’s a revenue strategy. The only question is which teams will realize it first.

Final Thought

The organizations that will thrive under FedRAMP, StateRAMP, CMMC, and the next wave of regulatory frameworks will be those that understand:

Continuous compliance is not controls, documentation, or integrations—it’s data. And that data should be continuously monitored where it lives: the SDLC itself.

TestifySec is one of the few companies making this shift possible today.

Dreamit Ventures invested in TestifySec because this was the vision we aligned on with the founding team—and they’ve now made that vision a reality.

So if you’re preparing for FedRAMP, modernizing your SDLC, or simply exhausted by the evidence scramble every audit cycle, it might be time to give cole@testifysec.com, founder of TestifySec, a call.

Disclaimer:

As a Partner at Dreamit Ventures, I gain unique insights into the evolving cybersecurity innovation ecosystem. I share these insights and my experience with my network of cybersecurity professionals to help them stay ahead of security and governance challenges.

Mel Shakir
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