Shift-left your cloud compliance auditing with Audit Manager

Cloud compliance can present significant regulatory and technical challenges for organizations. These complexities often include delineating compliance responsibilities and accountabilities between the customer and cloud provider Google Cloud Audit Manager, a powerful solution from Google Cloud, provides a comprehensive set of tools to help businesses monitor, control, and report on cloud-based activities, thereby meeting strict compliance requirements. And in this article, Gimasys will help you better understand Google Cloud Audit Manager and how it enhances audit compliance on the Cloud Platform for businesses.

Traditional compliance methodologies, reliant on manual processes for evidence collection, are inefficient, prone to errors, and resource-intensive. According to the Gartner® Audit Survey, “When surveyed on their key priorities for 2024, 75% of chief audit executives (CAEs) cited audit’s ability to keep up with the fast-evolving cybersecurity landscape as their top priority — making it the most commonly cited priority.”

Introducing Audit Manager

First, it must be recognized that auditability is becoming the most cited priority today. Audit Manager can help organizations accelerate compliance efforts by providing:

• Clear shared responsibility outlines: A matrix of shared responsibilities that delineates compliance duties between the cloud provider and customers, offering actionable recommendations tailored to your workloads.
• Automated compliance assessments: Evaluation of your workloads against industry-standard technical control requirements in a simple and automated manner. Audit manager already supports popular industry and regulatory frameworks including NIST 800-53, ISO, SOC, and CSA-CCM. You can see the full list of supported frameworks here. 
• Audit-ready evidence: Automated generation of comprehensive verifiable evidence reports to support your compliance claims and overarching governance activity. Audit Manager provides you with a quick execution summary of compliance at a framework level and the ability to deep-dive using control level reports.
• Actionable remediation guidance: Insights to swiftly address each compliance gap that is identified.

The compliance audit journey with Audit Manager

The cloud compliance audit process involves defining responsibilities, identifying and mitigating risks, collecting supporting data, and generating a final report. This process requires collaboration between Governance, Risk, and Compliance analysts, compliance managers, developers, and auditors, each with their own specific tasks. Audit Manager streamlines this process for all involved roles, which can help simplify their work and improve efficiency.

Client Case Study: Deutsche Börse Group

Deutsche Börse Group, an international stock exchange organization and innovative market infrastructure provider, began their strategic partnership with Google Cloud in 2022. Their cloud transformation journey is well under way, which brings with it the challenge of achieving and documenting compliance in their environment.

Florian Rodeit, head of cloud governance for Google Cloud, Deutsche Börse Group, first heard about Audit Manager during a Las Vegas Google Cloud Next 2024 session.

“The Audit Manager product promises a level of automation and audit control that has a lot of potential. At Deutsche Börse Group, we were excited to access the preview, explore the functionality further and build out a joint solution,” he said.

Following the European preview launch of Audit Manager, Deutsche Börse Group and Google Cloud set up a collaborative project to explore automating cloud controls via Audit Manager. Deutsche Börse Group had already created a comprehensive control catalog to manage their cloud control requirements across the organization. They analyzed the Cloud Security Alliance’s Cloud Controls Matrix against their written rules framework to create inputs for Audit Manager, and set out ownership and implementation guidelines for cloud-specific controls.

Now, Deutsche Börse Group can use Audit Manager to check if there are resources configured that deviate from the control framework, such as any resources that have been set up outside of approved regions. This provides automated, auditable evidence to support their specific requirements for compliant usage of Google Cloud resources..

Conclusion

In short, Google Cloud Audit Manager is an indispensable tool for businesses to ensure compliance with security and auditing regulations on the cloud platform. With the ability to track every activity in detail, generate transparent reports and analyze risks effectively, Google Cloud Audit Manager helps businesses protect data, minimize risks and increase customer trust. To learn more about how to apply Google Cloud Audit Manager to your business and receive support from experts, contact Gimasys now.