Becoming the End-to-End Cybersecurity Auditor

Cybersecurity compliance has fundamentally changed over the past decade. What was once a periodic, manual exercise is now expected to operate continuously. Platforms like Thoropass – as well as industry peers like Drata, Secureframe and Vanta – helped introduce compliance automation and gave organizations near‑real‑time visibility into the health of their IT controls.

This shift mattered, because instead of assessing controls once a quarter or even just once a year, companies could finally monitor them as they operated. A bonus that comes with such innovation is painless evidence collection. Gruntwork that used to take hours and hours is now completely automated, with reduced reporting overhead and minimized human error. For the first time, teams could detect policy violations in real time and fix them before they became audit findings, or worse: security risks and vulnerabilities to the organization. Enterprise‑grade compliance is now achievable for organizations of any size. 

Since we founded Thoropass, constant innovation has been a driving force behind the company. Alongside our peers, we’ve helped shape what modern risk management looks like in practice. Ever-increasing levels of automation, “compliance-as-code”, and trust centers are all the result of this constant desire to improve our offerings, and the competitive nature of the market has ensured that innovation hasn’t slowed. As a collective group, we’ve pushed the boundaries of what organizations can expect from their IT compliance solution. 

Compliance automation moved fast. Audits did not.

As compliance automation became standard, demand for formal audits and certifications grew with it. SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HITRUST assessments are now table stakes for many organizations. That demand has put real pressure on auditors, assessors, and cyber‑focused CPA firms.

Yet while compliance tooling continued to evolve, audit technology largely stood still. Many firms are still relying on workflows designed for a slower, more manual era.

The result has been a widening gap. Some auditors responded to growing complexity by hiring more staff to extend manual workflows. Others have reduced the depth of their fieldwork to increase throughput, thereby lowering the rigor of their audits and eroding trust in their outcomes. Neither approach scales, and neither serves the long‑term needs of organizations operating in an increasingly hostile security environment.

From compliance automation to audit transformation

Former Intel CEO Andy Grove once said, “You have to understand what you are better at than anybody else and mercilessly focus your efforts on it.” For Thoropass, that focus is clear: delivering rigorous and efficient audits that reflect how modern organizations actually operate.

The widening gap between modern compliance programs and outdated audit workflows has a clear answer: automation. And for the first time, the technology foundation to close that gap is truly here.

Large Language Models and modern GenAI systems are uniquely suited to the work auditors do every day: reviewing evidence, understanding context, mapping controls across frameworks, identifying gaps, and applying professional judgment at scale. These are not abstract use cases. They are the core, repetitive, time-consuming tasks that define audit fieldwork today. With the right guardrails, context, and human oversight, AI can dramatically reduce manual effort while raising the bar on consistency and rigor. Forget sacrificing one of speed, rigor or cost; with this paradigm shift, we can finally get the best version of all.

At the same time, we’ve been honest with ourselves about where Thoropass creates the most value, and where the industry needs the most help. We’ve completed thousands of audits across SOC 2, HITRUST, PCI DSS, and more, working alongside some of the most experienced cybersecurity and compliance professionals in the world. We’ve seen firsthand where audits break down, where time is wasted, and where quality is most at risk. This is not a theoretical problem. It’s a systemic one, and it’s not going to fix itself.

That conviction led us to a simple conclusion: we need to focus relentlessly on transforming the audit itself.

Today, I’m excited to re-introduce Thoropass as the only end-to-end cybersecurity auditor built for the AI era.

Our audits are powered by the Audit Lifecycle Platform — a purpose-built system we’ve developed to support our customers and our auditors throughout the entire assessment process. From continuous evidence collection and validation to managing complex multi-framework audits and AI-assisted fieldwork with human oversight, the platform enables us to deliver audits that are more rigorous, more consistent, and more aligned with how modern organizations actually operate.

Connecting the compliance ecosystem

Doubling down on audit takes many forms, and one of the most important is meeting customers where they already operate. That’s why we’re building a new suite of AI-centric capabilities that directly ingest from multiple GRC platforms and compliance automation tools into the Thoropass audit process. Our audits are designed to work seamlessly with any GRC or compliance automation platform, whether that’s Thoropass’s own Foundational GRC or more advanced GRC solutions like ServiceNow or Archer.

This approach gives customers the freedom to choose the technology stack that best fits their organization without sacrificing audit quality, rigor, or efficiency. There’s no forced rip-and-replace, no complex data migrations, and no endless hours of manual evidence collection just to make systems talk to each other.

One of the first and most tangible steps toward a truly GRC-agnostic audit is the launch of Smart Sort AI. Smart Sort automatically analyzes incoming evidence from any source, understands its context, and maps it to the correct audit requirement.

By removing the need for manual reorganization of platform-specific outputs, Smart Sort allows evidence to flow directly into the audit, wherever it originates. Along with many AI-powered workflows that we have already deployed, this eliminates hours of repetitive preparation, reduces human error, and ensures auditors are reviewing clean, organized, audit-ready evidence from day one. More importantly, it lets customers keep the tools they already use, while still receiving a seamless, high-quality Thoropass audit.

And this is only the beginning. We’re continuing to invest deeply across the audit lifecycle — automating the most manual, time-consuming work so our auditors can focus on the judgment, context, and rigor that only experience brings. In the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out additional capabilities designed to make audits even more seamless, while maintaining the level of trust and quality organizations depend on. We’re excited to share what’s next.

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