Compliance teams are facing a growing problem: an organisation can pass an audit one day and begin drifting out of compliance shortly afterwards, simply because its infrastructure has changed. Gal Yosef, Regional SE Director at AlgoSec, explores why‘ point-in-time’ compliance is increasingly struggling to keep pace with modern hybrid infrastructure and why organisations need to move towards continuous compliance and evidence of control.

An organisation might pass an audit on Monday and begin drifting out of compliance by Wednesday, without anything necessarily going wrong or anybody even knowing about it. A cloud deployment might change an access rule, a temporary firewall exception might become permanent or a third-party service might update an integration according to its own schedule. These changes look innocuous in isolation, but that’ s precisely what makes‘ timing’ such a perilous issue.

As they pile up, they create a growing mismatch between the controls an organisation has documented and the actual operating environment it finds itself in. That’ s a problem in a basic network environment, let alone a hybrid setup where applications and policies have to stretch across clouds, data centres, SaaS platforms and APIs. A quarterly review can only capture one moment, and compliance posture can change in the blink of an eye.

This is also becoming a key focal point for regulators, which is only adding to the pressure. DORA and NIS2 place greater emphasis on operational resilience, cybersecurity risk management, supply chain oversight and demonstrable accountability, making periodic

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