Standard : Compliance Coverage

Description

Compliance Coverage measures the percentage of systems, codebases, or workflows that are subject to automated compliance checks. It provides visibility into how thoroughly your engineering estate is governed by policy controls and regulatory requirements.

High compliance coverage helps reduce security risk, improve audit readiness, and prevent misconfigurations through continuous, codified checks.

How to Use

What to Measure

  • % of services, environments, or assets covered by automated compliance checks (e.g. security rules, policy-as-code, audit logging).
  • Can be scoped to infrastructure, identity/access, software supply chain, or specific regulatory domains (e.g. GDPR, SOC2, ISO 27001).

Formula

Compliance Coverage (%) = (Compliant Assets / Total In-Scope Assets) x 100

Instrumentation Tips

  • Use scanning tools (e.g. Checkov, OPA, Conftest, AWS Config) and IaC validations.
  • Integrate compliance rules into CI/CD workflows.
  • Maintain an inventory of in-scope assets with tagging and ownership.

Why It Matters

  • Risk reduction: Gaps in coverage create vulnerabilities and audit risk.
  • Trust & governance: Strengthens alignment with internal policies and external regulations.
  • DevSecOps maturity: Reflects how well security and compliance are embedded into delivery workflows.
  • Audit readiness: Enables traceability and faster compliance reporting.

Best Practices

  • Automate compliance enforcement early via CI/CD and IaC pipelines.
  • Define controls as code to ensure repeatability and auditability.
  • Maintain asset and control coverage maps to identify gaps.
  • Involve security and compliance teams in rule definition and refinement.
  • Continuously monitor and improve signal quality and false-positive rates.

Common Pitfalls

  • Assuming high coverage = no risk—coverage ≠ effectiveness.
  • Not updating compliance checks as infrastructure or policies evolve.
  • Treating compliance as a post-release checkbox rather than an engineering concern.
  • Lack of clarity on scope (e.g. unmanaged assets or shadow IT).

Signals of Success

  • High and increasing % of assets governed by policy-as-code.
  • Fewer manual exceptions or audit findings.
  • Engineers treat compliance checks as useful signals—not blockers.
  • Control coverage is reviewed and improved regularly.
  • [[Access Review Coverage]]
  • [[Vulnerability Detection Rate]]
  • [[Secrets Exposure Rate]]
  • [[Policy-as-Code Adoption]]
  • [[Change Failure Rate]]