7.3. Compliance Evaluation

Without continuous compliance evaluation, you only discover that your environment drifted from security standards — regulatory (PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2), industry (CIS Benchmarks), and organizational (your own baselines) — during audits, which means non-compliance may have persisted for months. Without continuous compliance evaluation, you only discover failures during audits — which means non-compliance may have existed for months between assessment cycles. Think of compliance like a health checkup: annual physicals catch problems that developed over the year, but continuous monitoring (like a fitness tracker) catches issues as they emerge. What makes AWS compliance uniquely powerful? AWS provides automated, continuous compliance tools that evaluate every resource against defined rules in real time — transforming compliance from a periodic event into a continuous assurance.

This section covers automated compliance detection and remediation, audit evidence collection, and architecture compliance evaluation.

Scenario: A quarterly compliance audit reveals 47 non-compliant resources across 20 accounts. The security team spends 3 weeks remediating. With continuous compliance, each non-compliance would have been detected and auto-remediated within hours.

Reflection Question: How does continuous compliance evaluation change the relationship between security teams and auditors?