Don’t Buy Compliance Automation Until You Know the Manual Alternative

Imagine that a platform for compliance costing $12,000 annually. Does that sound expensive?

It’s dependent on the part you’re replacing.

If $12,000 is spent to save hundreds of hours of repetitive evidence gathering in the complex technological world, it could be money wisely invested. If a small business with seven employees could gather the same evidence in a couple of hours every month, the result is quite different.

It’s a smart way to start your look for Vanta. Do not begin with asking which platform offers the most features. Ask how many hours and time these features can save your business.

Automated Manufacturing is an Break-Even Point

Automation of compliance isn’t intrinsically good or bad. Scale affects its value. Imagine a technology company that is growing that has hundreds of employees multiple cloud environments, numerous applications, and frequent access changes. Continuously gathering evidence manually could become a serious operational burden. Integrations that monitor systems automatically and collect evidence could easily justify the cost.

Imagine a startup of 10 employees preparing for the first SOC 2. audit. It might have a smaller infrastructure, and the gathering of evidence can be handled without a lot of automation.

That difference matters when evaluating Vanta pricing. A high-end platform can offer large capabilities, but those capabilities can only provide financial value when the organization actually needs them.

Compare Architecture, not Just Brands

Vanta vs Drata is a comparison that could easily be a feature-by-feature test. It is crucial to evaluate the services, features contract and quotes offered by each platform. Both are well-established platform for compliance, which focuses on automation and integrations.

Another decision needs to be made before that. Does your company want an integration-driven platform for compliance or not? Certain companies would like constant monitoring as well as automated evidence collection. Others prefer to present evidence themselves, especially when the workload remains modest.

Vanta Competitors Do Not All Use the same model

Many Vanta competitors are also in a similar category that concentrates on automation. There are lighter platforms focused on organization with the vast system connectivity.

CertAssist is a part of this group. CertAssist is a product developed by internal auditors, compliance consultants, as well as other experts, organizes the controls frameworks in a central place. It lets you edit guidelines and policies to support auditing, and permits auditors to examine evidence with read-only access.

It doesn’t install agents or connect to infrastructure systems. Customers choose and upload the evidence they want to provide.

Be aware of the system’s access.

Eliminating integrations has a distinct disadvantage: one must collect evidence manually.

It also eliminates integration setup and also means that the application does not require standing connections to the company’s operational environment.

Both architectures aren’t universally superior. It is important to ask what choices make sense for your company.

CertAssist targets teams between five to 200 members. Its pricing is publicized rather than requiring the salesperson to obtain the initial price. The price stated for the launch of CertAssist is $225 monthly, as opposed to the usual $375.

Let Complexity earn its place

The requirements of a 10 person startup today won’t necessarily be its requirements at 100 or 500 employees.

Compliance can be maintained with a simple platform. The cost of automation could be increased as systems, employees and frameworks multiply. This is a much better approach to acquire compliance technologies to let complexity earn its place.

Don’t spend money on fifty integrations just because they look impressive on a comparison chart. You should purchase them only if you realize that the cost of the task they replace manually is greater.