Maintaining Continuous Compliance with Trustero AI

Best practices and actionable steps for staying audit-ready year-round

Objective

• Purpose: This guide provides best practices and actionable steps to help you maintain continuous compliance with Trustero, ensuring your organization remains audit-ready at all times. By following this checklist, you will avoid the "fire drill" before audits, proactively identify and address gaps, and keep your compliance posture strong throughout the year.
• Target Audience: This guide is designed for compliance managers, security officers, and anyone responsible for managing audit readiness and ongoing compliance within their organization. It assumes a basic understanding of compliance requirements and Trustero’s platform.

Introduction

Maintaining continuous compliance is crucial for staying ahead of audits. By setting up Trustero’s AI to continuously monitor controls and mitigate risks, your organization can identify gaps early and address them before they become issues. This guide will walk you through the steps to ensure your Trustero account is set up for ongoing compliance, reducing the risk of findings during audits.

Overview

In this guide is a series of steps designed to keep your organization on track with continuous compliance:

Checklist for Continuous Compliance

1. Wrap up recent audit and address feedback
2. Review and restrict account access
3. Stay updated with new Trustero features and content
4. Review the scope of your account for upcoming audits
5. Leverage Trustero AI for continuous compliance monitoring

Each section includes actionable tips and recommendations to help you stay on top of your compliance tasks and keep your organization audit-ready.

Checklist for Continuous Compliance

1. Wrap up recent audit and address feedback

• Debrief with internal stakeholders: Review what went well, what could be improved, and any auditor recommendations or findings.
• Create a project plan for addressing any findings or recommendations.
• Close the audit instance in Trustero and upload the final report or certificate to your account.

2. Review and restrict account access

• Remove unnecessary users and ensure only those who need access remain in the system.
• Review role-based access for remaining users, ensuring only the necessary permissions are granted.
  • Assign the Auditor user role to any auditors who still require access. The Auditor role allows read-only access to your account, ensuring that auditors can view relevant data without making changes.

• • Assign the Read-Only user role to any users who need access to view information but shouldn’t make any changes. This role allows users to view but not edit data within the account.

• • Trustero Admin Users have full access to all features within the account, including settings, integrations, and user management. They can make changes to account configurations and manage user roles. Learn more about Trustero user roles and permissions here.

3. Stay updated with new Trustero features and curated content

• Review product announcements for new features and functionalities in the Trustero blog.
• Opt into the latest control version to increase the quality and accuracy of your AI scan results, while ensuring you are aligned with latest compliance regulations. 
  • Learn more and opt in
• Stay up-to-date with Trustero’s Policy Template Change Log to ensure your policies are aligned with latest compliance regulations. 

4. Review the scope of your account for upcoming audits

• Assess whether your next audit’s scope differs from the previous one. If so, update your account’s content accordingly (e.g., Scope page, receptor integrations, control evidence).

• Common reasons for scope changes:

  • New product or environment added
  • Scope reduction to a specific product
  • Addition of new Trust Service Criteria for SOC 2 (e.g., availability, confidentiality, processing integrity)
  • Merger or acquisition
  • Requirement for a new compliance framework (e.g., ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR etc.)

5. Leverage Trustero AI for continuous compliance monitoring

• Run a full AI Control Check scan to assess gaps and identify areas needing remediation.
• Remediate any gaps and ensure that all controls pass with green checks.
• Determine scan frequency: We recommend scanning daily or weekly. Continuous control checks will only scan controls that have been updated since the last scan.
• Maintain the cadence from the operational procedures tracker to ensure you stay on track.
  • Review your “Documented Information Security Operational Activities” tracker (required for control IS02) to ensure controls and responsible owners are tracking all operational activities. Access the template for the tracker here.