Ask any CISO about “audit season” and you’ll get a wince, not an answer. For many security leaders, audit season isn’t a season at all, it’s most of the year. 
 
In a recent fireside chat, Rick Orloff, CISO at Everpure, and Jeremy Turner, CISO at Paidy, compared notes on what happens when a growing company stacks up SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, NIST CSF, and an ever-shifting pile of customer due diligence questionnaires. Plus, what changes when you finally stop running them as separate projects. 
 
Their conversation cut through the theory and got specific: real dollar figures, real engineering hours, real mistakes they’d make differently. Here are the five takeaways that stood out. 

1. The real audit burden isn’t the frameworks, it’s the due diligence

Every security leader expects SOC 2 and ISO 27001 to take time. What catches teams off guard is everything sitting on top of those frameworks: the customer due diligence questionnaires that show up unannounced, get filled out from memory on a spreadsheet under deadline pressure, and then resurface months later when the customer asks for evidence to back up the answers. 

That second wave is where the real friction lives. Teams end up fielding the same evidence requests from the same system owners, over and over, for audits that were never coordinated with each other in the first place. A-LIGN’s own Compliance Benchmark Report backs this up — roughly a quarter of organizations name juggling multiple audits as their single biggest compliance challenge. 

2. The ROI on harmonization 

The fix both leaders arrived at, independently, wasn’t a new tool. It was a scheduling and governance decision: line up your compliance frameworks so their audit windows overlap, and treat evidence as reusable across all of them instead of collecting it fresh for each one. 

The payoff is concrete. One team saved twelve weeks of engineering time in a single cycle simply by not going back to ask the same stakeholders for the same evidence three separate times. The tradeoff is real, too — compressing your audit calendar means executives have to commit to fast evidence turnaround, since there’s no longer slack in the schedule to chase people down. 

3. Automation buys back hours. It doesn’t remove the human. 

Both leaders have leaned into automated evidence collection, and the results are measurable: one team automated 60%-70% of its evidence gathering and calculated $500,000 in savings across consulting fees, tooling, and internal effort. 

But neither treated automation as a finish line. Every automated answer on a thousand-line due diligence questionnaire still needs a human to read and validate it before it goes out the door, because a wrong answer at that scale creates far more risk than the manual hours it saved. 

4. Pick a partner that shortens your timeline 

Shortened timelines can lead to cost savings that could help you expand your compliance program. If your audit firm isn’t the one suggesting ways to line up your frameworks and shorten the timeline, that’s a signal you may not have the right one. Firms with the right incentives makes your program more efficient, which frees up budget to self-fund the next certification, rather than defending the length of the current one. 

A quality audit partner will evaluate your current program and identify commonalities in frameworks so you can spend less time hunting for duplicative evidence and more time expanding your compliance program. This change means that your timeline will shift. Rather than attending nonstop meetings to address your complete portfolio, your meeting schedule should be streamlined too. The right auditor will ensure that your time is spent wisely meeting with the right team to achieve your goals.

5. Narrow your scope and don’t wait to combine frameworks

The most common early mistake is scoping an audit too broadly out of caution. A tightly defined scope — built around what the business actually monetizes and what regulators require — is easier to defend, faster to execute, and easier to extend later. 

Asked what they’d do differently, both leaders gave a version of the same answer: stop treating NIST CSF, ISO 27001, and SOC 2 as sequential projects. Scope and pursue them together from the start. The pain of running them separately is invisible until you’ve lived through it, so the leaders who haven’t yet are the hardest ones to convince. 

Audit fatigue isn’t a compliance problem, it’s a coordination problem. It’s also solvable with the same tools most security teams already have: a harmonized control set, disciplined scoping, honest conversations about business risk, and a partner who’s incentivized to make the process shorter, not longer. 

To get started on your journey to audit harmonization, reach out today.