Security Audits Explained: Understanding Compliance-Focused Security Assessments
Most organizations confuse security audits with pentests. Learn why audits measure compliance, not security—and why you still need them anyway.
Here’s a common problem: the term “security audit” gets thrown around so loosely that it’s become a catch-all label for virtually any security assessment activity. This isn’t just sloppy terminology—it’s actively harmful. When everything is an “audit,” the word loses its meaning, and organizations end up expecting one type of assessment to serve five different purposes. That confusion doesn’t facilitate cooperation either between teams or service providers.
An audit is a specific type of assessment with a specific purpose, and that’s what I’ll be unpacking today.
Throughout this series, I examine security assessment methods through five key characteristics:
Goal. What are we trying to achieve?
Scope. What falls within our assessment boundaries?
Time. What’s our timeline?
Effort. How much resource investment delivers adequate ROI?
Automation. What portions of this work can we automate?
These five dimensions naturally reveal the contrasts between assessment types. They help you understand not just what makes an audit different from a pentest or threat modeling, but more importantly, when to deploy each method within your organization.
Because here’s the thing: calling everything a “pentest” or labeling every assessment an “audit” creates dysfunction. You need different tools for different stages. Sometimes you need an audit. Other times you need vulnerability assessment, threat modeling, or penetration testing. Knowing which stage calls for which method requires understanding the fundamental differences between them.
And yes, “all models are wrong, but some are useful”—this one included.
This article series includes:
Part 3: Security Audits (you are here)
Part 4: Vulnerability Assessments (coming soon)
Part 5: Penetration Testing (coming soon)
Part 6: Red Teaming (coming soon)
TL;DR: Security audits evaluate compliance with standards rather than directly measuring security effectiveness. They provide essential benefits: establishing your current security position, ensuring alignment with industry standards, and enabling progress tracking through repeatable assessments. While compliant doesn’t always mean secure, audits remain crucial for understanding where you stand and planning improvements.
What is a Security Audit? Definition and Purpose
The word “audit” originates from the Latin term “auditor,” which means listener. This word was historically associated with the “hearing of accounts” in ancient Rome, where one official would listen to another reading documents to compare them and identify any discrepancies.
To this day audits remain a cornerstone of the financial world and while I do enjoy discussing financial and investment topics, I’ll set that aside for now. Today, we’ll focus on the realm of security audits.
So, what is a security audit then? In its broadest definition, a security audit is an independent evaluation of a system against a standard in order to verify and/or ensure compliance. Not security, compliance.
The system mentioned in the definition could be a product, an IT system, or even an entire organization. In turn, the standard might encompass an industry standard, a norm, a legal regulation, or even an internal policy.
I’d like to reiterate a hidden point from above—the goal of an audit is not to confirm the effectiveness of security measures or prove that a control is actively fulfilling its intended purpose. The goal of an audit, its strategic objective, is compliance.
Consider the following example: During an audit, if a control specifies that my web applications must be protected by a Web Application Firewall (WAF), the auditor usually will not examine whether my WAF configuration is correct or incorrect. As long as a WAF is present, the assumption is that applications are in fact “protected by it” (i.e., the control is considered satisfied). So, even if the WAF is improperly configured and thus ineffective, it does not impact the audit results.
And this approach is appropriate because assessing the effectiveness of the WAF should be part of a penetration test, which itself can be part of a larger audit. In fact, performing one security assessment type on behalf of another is a standard way of doing things (e.g., threat modeling done at the beginning of a pentest; pentesting performed as part of a larger audit effort; et cetera). I call it the Matryoshka Effect of Security Assessments™.
Anyway, the point I tried to make by consistently emphasizing compliance over security is this: results of an audit can be manipulated (and they often are, but that’s a topic for another discussion).
The need for compliance, and therefore an audit, is usually external. It might be driven by changes in the regulatory landscape (e.g., regulatory requirements like DORA, CRA, or NIS2), or it could be due to business needs, such as when a European SaaS company wants to gain clients in the US and is required to comply with SOC 2. Ultimately, being compliant with a specific standard makes it easy to conduct apples-to-apples comparisons, which is one of the primary goals of any regulation or standard.
For example, in my backyard (Poland), companies typically start considering ISO 27001 when they begin sales to international clients. For these clients, compliance with this standard serves as proof that the company meets the minimum baseline for information security necessary to become their business partner.
BTW, I was once told by an experienced auditor that “not every organization compliant with ISO 27001 is secure, but every secure organization is compliant with ISO 27001”, which perfectly captures the point I wanted to make earlier: an audit can only confirm compliance, and it’s possible to be compliant while not being secure. (Warm regards, Jakub! 😊)
And while we’re still on the topic of standards—it’s worth noting that some of them are stricter than others (e.g., FedRAMP vs. SOC 2), which of course has an impact on scope…
How Long Do Security Audits Take? Scope, Timeline, and Resource Requirements
An audit can be broad, encompassing various aspects such as people, processes, and IT. But it can also be narrow. The scope is determined by the standard against which we are auditing.
However, regardless of the scope, for an auditor to perform a reliable and trustworthy audit, they must have access to all the necessary information to carry out their task effectively. In fact, unless we are doing shady things, it’s in our own best interest to help the auditor. (The Enron case could serve here as a classic counterexample.)
An audit can focus exclusively on policies or on technical aspects. However, most audits are a combination of both—an audit against industry-accepted standards and norms involves a review of policies alongside a technical evaluation. For example, ISO 27001 involves policy validation, vulnerability assessments, and penetration testing.
Internally, audits are managed by the Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) unit, if one exists, or by a special task group formed specifically for the audit if the GRC unit is not available.
The time needed to conduct an audit depends on the standards being audited against and the size of the organization undergoing the audit. An audit could take a couple of weeks, such as auditing a small or medium-sized business (SMB) against ISO 27001. However, it might take several months when auditing the same SMB against SOC 2 Type 2 due to the need for extensive proof of controls.
This is related to the demand for resources—the larger the audit, the more people are needed. In theory, even the largest audit could be performed by just one person; however, in practice, this would be unfeasible. In practice, audits are conducted by small teams of auditors and—similar to Red Teaming—domain experts can be utilized “on the fly,” so they don’t need to be full-time team members.
Conversely, from the perspective of the organization being audited, engaging a broader range of individuals in various roles can help prevent the problem of tunnel vision.
A great example of this is found in the book The Phoenix Project, where John, the security expert at Parts Unlimited, falls victim to tunnel vision during the “SOX404 audit” (he, he). To John’s great surprise, the this audit was passed successfully despite his conviction of a lack of security controls in the IT systems under his watch. The twist was that John had only focused on his own area of expertise and failed to consider the entire business. As a result, he was unaware that certain controls he deemed critical were actually unnecessary because other business processes already covered them. Thus, while the goals of the audit were being met, they were not being fulfilled in the exact area John had anticipated, which is a textbook example (he, he) of tunnel vision during an audit.
Automation Capabilities in Security Audits
When it comes to audits, the feasibility of automation depends on the subject of the audit and the standards being evaluated against.
For example, automating an audit of an entire organization can be challenging. On the other hand, automating an audit of a Kubernetes platform against CIS Benchmarks can be done quite easily (although it might cause some pain in the beginning).
Both of these are audits, but their scope is entirely different. So, since I am a consultant, with regard to automation, I’d simply say that it depends.
Yes, I’m aware of companies such as Vanta or Drata; they do help with automation of certain parts of the process for certain standards, but I wouldn’t call it automation in the engineering sense (set it and forget it). At best, it’s semi-automation.
Summary: Why Security Audits Matter
Security audits operate at a broader and higher altitude than vulnerability assessments or penetration tests. Yet, they play an essential role in security. And I’m using “security” deliberately here, not limiting it to cybersecurity alone, but encompassing the wider domains of security and safety.
Why do audits matter? Because they answer a fundamental question: Where are we right now?
Think of it as navigation. To reach any destination, you need three things in order: (1) know where you’re going, (2) understand where you currently are, and (3) plot the route between them. Skip step two and you’re navigating blind. You can’t chart a meaningful course without knowing your starting coordinates.
But audits deliver two additional strategic benefits beyond establishing your baseline.
First, they enable you to leverage collective intelligence. Aligning with industry standards means you’re tapping into accumulated market insights and battle-tested practices rather than reinventing the wheel.
Second, audits are inherently repeatable. This replicability is what transforms a single assessment into a measurement system. You can conduct the same audit quarterly, annually, or on whatever cadence makes sense—and each iteration reveals whether you’re actually moving forward or just running in place.
This last point about tracking progress over time is particularly important, and I’ll be returning to it in future articles. Subscribe to receive updates directly in your inbox.
Addendum: How to Challenge Auditor Requirements Effectively
I have one more thing to say about audits: Auditors should not be viewed as the ultimate authority. There may be instances where the auditor does not completely understand the purpose of a particular requirement. This issue is related to tunnel vision, but this time it affects the auditor and not the party being audited.
This is because, often, a given control requires domain knowledge to grasp its underlying purpose. In such cases, the auditor might interpret the control too literally, missing this hidden objective—specifically, why the control exists and what it’s intended to achieve.
Consider this scenario: An auditor requires you to conduct periodic vulnerability scans of your infrastructure using a market-recognized tool, let’s say Nessus. This is a control that needs to be satisfied, but the problem is that your infrastructure consists of ephemeral Docker containers that are part of a cloud-based cluster. So, do you really need to periodically run Nessus on this cluster? Certainly not, that would be absurd!
The objective of the control is to ensure that everything within your infrastructure is up-to-date and free from known vulnerabilities. This is an actual purpose of these scans. So, in the environment I described, achieving this goal isn’t about scanning live infrastructure and performing security patching. Instead, it is about ensuring that your images are up-to-date and free from known vulnerabilities before they enter the cluster. Which is important because this goal is accomplished by a different team, using a different tool, and at a different point in the software development lifecycle.
Now, let’s return to the topic of manipulating audit results because sometimes—even when you’re correct—strict compliance is still an obligation. And on this topic, I remember the epic way Cloudflare bypassed the audit requirement very similar to our example.
In a nutshell: Cloudflare is one of those edge cases that doesn’t fit into the cookie-cutter approach required by a typical audit. Consequently, they weren’t fully satisfied with the offerings from market leaders in vulnerability scanning and the capabilities of their tools. So, with the help of an intern, they developed their own vulnerability scanner, FLAN Scan. This scanner uses Nmap as the network scanning engine and incorporates the Vulners script to provide vulnerability references. They enhanced the tool by adding detailed PDF reporting and released it as an open-source project. Cloudflare saved a significant amount of money with this approach while satisfying the audit requirement for vulnerability scans.
A similar scenario might occur when the auditor relies on a set of specific answers, requiring additional justification for any answers outside that framework.
On several occasions, I have had to challenge the auditor’s assessment, which ultimately benefited my clients. One such instance involved contesting the implementation of a static analysis. The client was using SonarQube, but the auditor deemed it an unacceptable substitute for solutions like Checkmarx or Veracode. I stepped in and argued that, in my SME opinion—based on my knowledge of how static analysis works, my experience with various tools, and my understanding of its objectives—SonarQube is indeed a suitable and more cost-effective alternative. The argument I made won, but it was only because I had all the necessary background to understand it and then make it.