PwC and AWS transform compliance from a hurdle to an advantage: Automating control assessment at scale

Compliance validation is normally a time-consuming activity filled with risks. Errors, omissions and outright failures can result in regulatory penalties, unfavorable press and a diminished brand image. As enterprise teams race to keep up with rapidly evolving compliance demands, one thing is clear: the traditional way of working — using manual analysis — is no longer sufficient.

Adding to the challenge, inconsistent documentation, siloed interpretations, and haphazard reviews aren’t just ineffective, they’re unsustainable.

PwC assists organizations in rethinking how their compliance processes can work more effectively within existing systems. By helping teams connect the dots across solutions — such as code repositories, CI/CD pipelines, and security platforms — we assist in introducing automation where it adds the most value. This service-led approach complements current governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) structures rather than replacing them.

Through this integration, organizations can move from reactive, checklist-driven compliance to a more strategic posture — one that enables consistent assessments, reduces manual effort, and delivers timely, actionable insights across the enterprise.

The challenge: Manual compliance doesn’t scale

Words like time-consuming, fragmented and frustrating are often associated with compliance processes. It is not difficult to understand why. Gathering information, reviewing practices and demonstrating compliance is frequently slow and inconsistent. Different teams approach tasks in different ways. This results in bottlenecks, inconsistency, fragmented oversight and no unified approach.

The challenges often multiply. Teams use different evidence (such as screenshots) to address controls. This can lead to different conclusions about the same evidence or results, as well as additional corrections and repeated reviews. It can also lead to different groups configuring systems differently, thus undermining enterprise alignment.

In the end, compliance can end up fragmented across multiple systems, further complicating things. Teams often pull data from multiple sources — security platforms, code repositories, CI/CD pipelines, for example — to gather essential information.

Organizations are often left with an incomplete picture of their enterprise security posture, which can lead to misplaced priorities and effort — focusing on areas that may not align with actual risk or control gaps.

The approach: Automating compliance from data to decision

PwC introduces automation and orchestration into the compliance process. It can bridge the gap between control assignments and real-time validation. The power of this capability lies in its ability to pull data from existing sources — security scanners, code repositories, CI/CD platforms — and automatically evaluate whether conditions meet assigned controls.

Here’s how it can help:

• GRC-driven trigger: When the GRC platform assigns a control to an application, it can automatically initiate the confirmation process.
• Data aggregation: The capability helps pull evidence from relevant systems — source code, deployment pipelines, agent states, and more.
• Custom logic evaluation: The capability can test the data against industry frameworks relevant to the enterprise and enterprise-specific control logic.
• Centralized reporting: The capability can send results back to the GRC platform, so that it serves as an authoritative system of record.
• Dashboards and insights: Application teams and security leadership have access to intuitive and easy-to-read dashboards showing gaps, trends, and remediation options.

This isn’t a GRC replacement. It’s a capability that can take compliance far beyond conventional boundaries. And because it connects to existing enterprise systems, it doesn’t require process reengineering or substantial training.

Why it helps: 10 strategic benefits

1. Centralized visibility. There’s a unified approach for compliance that stretches across the enterprise. This, in turn, can simplify audits and improve executive oversight.
2. Custom logic. PwC’s approach enables organizations to assess compliance against the standards and frameworks that matter most to them. The process can incorporate organizational policies and internal risk criteria, applying logic that reflects each client’s specific operating environment and priorities.
3. Reduces manual challenges. In client use cases, automation has reduced manual effort by up to 97%, turning 30-minute tasks into one-minute checks.
4. Enterprise-wide consistency. Each team and control are assessed with the same logic. This can help reduce subjectivity and the need to rework tasks and analysis due to inconsistent evidence.
5. Event-based automation. Assessments take place automatically as they are required by GRC workflows. There’s no waiting for humans to step into the process. Compliance takes place in real time.
6. Built to scale. The modular architecture can support applications, infrastructure, multi-cloud environments, and more. The capability can be easily extensible to new domains and control types.
7. Full-stack evidence evaluation. The capability can pull from pipelines, SBOMs, source code, cloud infrastructure, agent statuses, and more to help deliver a complete picture.
8. Developer-centric support. Engineers receive failure explanations, implementation guidance via GitHub pages, and customized JIRA tasks that help with remediation.
9. Real-time incident response. The capability can log compliance failures instantly to GRC. This enables rapid response workflows and always-current risk visibility.
10. Supports organizational growth. An organization can accommodate growing application portfolios, multi-cloud environments, evolving threats, changing organizational standards and regulatory changes. This makes it possible to future-proofs a compliance strategy.

Real impact, not just theoretical gains

Automated compliance is more than a way to work faster, it’s a way to work smarter and better.

In observed client scenarios, automation has led to time and cost reductions ranging from 80% to 97%. For organizations with large application portfolios — such as 1,000 applications and 20 annual controls — this has translated to potential savings of more than 10,000 labor hours per year.

The end result? An organization no longer has to choose between a cost-prohibitive compliance framework or taking chances with risk. Instead, it can achieve visibility, standardization, and the ability to confirm that no application goes unchecked. Human constraints are likely a thing of the past.

Rethinking the future of compliance

The world has changed, and enterprises should change with it. Security compliance is more than a check-the-box exercise that hinges on passing audits. There’s a need to build trust — internally and externally. An enterprise should be able to prove, at any moment, that it is acting responsibly and within the confines of a compliance framework.

Decreasing manual tasks, reducing inconsistent methods, and mitigating siloed approaches — often dependent on logs, screenshots and incomplete data — becomes outdated. Automation can take compliance to a higher level. PwC’s capability shifts compliance validation from a manual hurdle to a competitive advantage.

• With insights from Jason Stauffenecker - Cybersecurity , Risk and Regulatory Principal at PwC US.