Buy vs Build: CISO’s guide to continuous compliance & CCM
With rising regulatory pressure and increasing board scrutiny, point-in-time audits no longer cut it. Continuous compliance is now essential, but also complex. In Panaseer's latest Security Leaders Peer Report, 85% of security leaders say internal reporting demands are growing. This post explores whether to build your own Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM) capability or invest in a purpose-built platform, and the key benefits for strengthening your controls assurance strategy every day.
Liana Vickery
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Why traditional compliance approaches are breaking down
Security teams today must demonstrate real-time compliance with a growing web of regulatory frameworks - ranging from the SEC’s Cybersecurity Risk Management guidelines, to DORA in the EU, and global standards like ISO 27001 and NIST CSF. A major challenge organizations face is managing these overlapping requirements efficiently without duplicating effort.
Yet many still rely on traditional audit methods like ring-fencing systems or spinning up isolated environments using siloed data and manual processes. These approaches are slow, resource-intensive, and prone to error, with security teams in 2025 reporting they spend 30% or more of their time on reporting alone.
A continuous compliance model replaces periodic, time consuming efforts with automated, ongoing visibility into control effectiveness, enabling faster, more confident responses to audits, regulators, and executive stakeholders.
What is CCM and why does it solve the compliance bottleneck?
Continuous Controls Monitoring – or CCM - automates the assessment and validation of security controls across your entire security posture. By collating data from across various tools such as vulnerability scanners, identity management systems, endpoint protection platforms, and configuration management databases a CCM approach can give you regular insight into whether key controls are operating as expected.
Purpose-built CCM platforms, like Panaseer, also go a step further. By using proven data science techniques to normalize, correlate, visualize, and map this information against policies, frameworks and regulations, security teams can easily highlight compliance gaps and reduce control-related risk, continuously. Advanced features like auto‑remediation suggestions, trend analysis over time, and risk‑scoring algorithms help you prioritize fixes based on business impact rather than raw failure counts.
CCM platforms typically include a standardized controls library that aligns technical control checks to specific regulatory and internal requirements. This creates a process where every control is documented, mapped, and versioned, ensuring traceability and reusability across different regulations.
But implementing either a CCM way-of-working or a CCM platform isn’t one-size-fits-all. For some security leaders, building their own solution using a data lake and visualization and analysis tool will provide the oversight they need. Others will use a purpose-built platform, saving considerable time and resource, whilst also benefiting from specialist support and best practice guidance.
So, what are the differences, and what is right for your organisation?
Is your team still manually mapping controls to frameworks? Download the Buyer’s choice guide to Continuous Controls Monitoring to see what automation could look like.
Should you buy or build a CCM solution?
A side-by-side comparison To help you evaluate your options, here’s how a purpose-built platform compares to building your own solution across key dimensions.
Feature Comparison: CCM Platform vs. Home-Grown Solution
| Capability | Purpose-Built Platform | In-house Solution |
|---|---|---|
| Compliance Mapping | Predefined frameworks, auto-mapped to relevant metrics and data sources | Manual metrics mapping to frameworks |
| Data Normalization | Automated ingestion and normalization across security tools | Requires custom ETL pipelines or manual scripting |
| Tool Integration | Plug-and-play connectors for key control domains | APIs and scripts needed; often updated manually and therefore can lack continual visibility |
| Monitoring & Alerts | Real-time dashboards, alerts for control gaps | Periodic reviews, limited automation |
| Executive & Audit Reporting | Built-in, customizable templates with evidence trails | Often reliant on spreadsheets, manual consolidation and analysis which is prone to human error |
| Scalability & Maintenance | Supported, scalable with continuous improvements | Internal ownership of scaling, updates, troubleshooting |
Strategic considerations: what cyber leaders need to know
A purpose-built CCM platform will make sense when:
- You’re managing multiple compliance frameworks (DORA, SOX, NIST, etc.)
- You want to reduce time to audit and scale assurance across your organization
- You need data you can trust to report to the board or regulators
- You’re looking to move fast without hiring a team of data engineers
Investing the time and resource in a home-grown solution might work when:
- Your compliance scope is narrow and focused on just a few frameworks
- You already have a strong internal data capability
- You need a temporary bridge before committing to a platform investment
Bridging the gap between in-house CCM with a platform
For many organizations, the buy vs build debate isn’t always a binary decision.
Plenty of security teams have already laid the groundwork of an internal CCM approach by aggregating control data in a central repository – often a data lake – paired with analytics, visualisation or BI tools, like PowerBI or Tableau. They might pull in Splunk logs, CloudTrail events, and asset‑inventory exports into Snowflake or AWS Athena, then build manual queries for compliance checks.
Whilst these foundations can offer early visibility, they often lack the deeper analysis, governance, and compliance-specific capabilities of a purpose-built platform. Those without an advanced CCM platform in place, like Panaseer’s, will not have access to advanced features, such as framework mapping, proven dashboard reporting or compound risk metrics. These advanced capabilities reduce false positives and streamline auditor queries by showing exactly how each data point maps back to a control requirement.
In-house solutions and CCM platforms are not mutually exclusive. CCM platforms – and Panaseer in particular - can sit on top of your existing data lake, adding an additional layer of context, on-going product innovation and dedicated best-practice support. In short, you can keep the flexibility of your own data stack whilst elevating it with tested controls assurance and compliance capabilities. Even organizations with in‑house solutions often realize the value of layering a platform on top to introduce repeatability, scalability, and better cross‑team alignment.
What is the right continuous compliance approach?
The right approach to continuous compliance will depend on your organization’s scale, maturity, and resources. But one thing is clear: manual compliance is no longer sustainable in a world of real-time threats and increasing regulatory scrutiny.
Whether starting from scratch or building on existing investments, implementing a CCM platform can help you move faster, report more confidently, and free your team to focus on genuine security improvements – not just evidence collection.
Ready to explore your CCM options?
Download the Buyer’s choice guide to Continuous Controls Monitoring for a full breakdown of your investment options, platform capabilities, and use cases to help you move forward with confidence.
About the author
Liana Vickery
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