Compliance Theater: Why Cybersecurity's Favorite Shakespearean Tragedy is Failing Us

"IT security teams, especially the compliance cast, love drama. The slower, more arcane, and less intelligible the script, the louder the applause. Every few years, someone strides onstage with a seemingly edgy rallying cry: "Let's burn it all down and start again!" Let's be honest: torching the set doesn't fix the play. The real villain isn't any one framework. It's the lackluster production we force our best people to perform "assessments" that consume weeks, cost a fortune, and deliver stale, unread artifacts."

"The General Services Administration (GSA) tried to break this cycle with the FedRAMP 20x pilot, a push to drag compliance into the 21st century. Goals included: Automate checks so teams stop dying inside chasing artifacts. Reuse strong commercial practices instead of reinventing government wheels. Shift from point-in-time snapshots to continuous, data-driven proof. Build trust directly between agencies and providers-no binder middleman. Stop slowing down innovation just to satisfy the audit calendar."

"Traditional assessments repeat the same tired scenes: pages of narrative "implementation statements" drafted by non-engineers; expensive engineers reduced to screenshot clerks; the whole bundle shipped to auditors with fingers crossed that no one notices half the evidence is already out of date. Passing an audit in January tells you nothing meaningful about your security in March."

Point-in-time compliance assessments produce stale, unreadable artifacts and waste engineering time while offering little assurance after the audit snapshot. Screenshots and static evidence packages rapidly become obsolete, turning engineers into clerks and auditors into recipients of incomplete or outdated proof. The FedRAMP 20x pilot advocates automating checks, reusing strong commercial practices, shifting to continuous data-driven evidence, building direct trust between agencies and providers, and removing binder-based middlemen. Continuous, query-driven compliance provides real-time assurance, reduces artifact chasing, lowers costs, and enables faster innovation without sacrificing regulatory trust or security visibility.

Read at Securitymagazine