Insight
Automating Evidence from DevOps Tooling
Most of the data auditors need already flows through your source control, CI, cloud, ticketing and HR systems. Capture it at source to eliminate screenshot theater.
High-yield automation targets
- Access reviews: Export role membership diffs from IAM / SSO and store signed review artifacts.
- Change management: Tag production deployments in CI and link commits to tickets automatically.
- Infrastructure baseline: Generate daily Terraform plan summaries to prove least privilege & drift detection.
- Vulnerability management: Ingest scanner APIs (SCA, container, SAST) into a unified risk queue with SLA metadata.
- HR termination checks: Hook HRIS offboarding events to trigger and log immediate access revocation jobs.
Pattern: evidence as code
Create lightweight scripts or GitHub Actions that: (1) pull raw data (API/CLI), (2) normalize to JSON, (3) sign with hash + timestamp, (4) store in a tamper-evident bucket or artifact store.
Designing for auditor consumption
Pair machine-readable JSON with a generated human summary (Markdown/HTML). Auditors can sample raw entries while relying on summarized metrics.
Governance & assurance
Track automation jobs like any production service: ownership, run frequency, failure alerting, and change control via PRs.
Quick start stack
- Inventory current manual evidence pulls.
- Rank by frequency x effort.
- Automate top 3 with scripts/workflows.
- Embed success metrics (minutes saved, errors reduced).
- Iterate monthly.
Published: Aug 27, 2025