Why automation is key to modernizing federal IT compliance

Every federal CIO and CISO faces a mission-critical reality: risk must be managed continuously, and compliance must be demonstrated in real-time across a growing list of mandates and objectives —whether FISMA, RMF automation, or Zero Trust. Yet the way many agencies execute these responsibilities today still reflects a bygone era. Compliance remains mired in manual processes, where teams wrangle data across sprawling spreadsheets, cross-reference siloed systems, and coordinate endless status updates to keep pace.

This reliance on outdated “spreadsheet-era mechanics” isn’t just inefficient — requiring sometimes dozens of people or more — it can be dangerous. It introduces friction, increases costs, obscures risk, and puts agencies on the wrong side of the threat landscape and the federal government’s security priorities. When compliance activities are episodic rather than continuous, agencies effectively operate with a blind spot to risks that are occurring every day in real-time. However, the answer is not another static, manually built dashboard layered on yesterday’s processes. It is a fundamental shift to automation.

The Modernization Imperative

Federal governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) modernization rests on three pillars: automation, analytics, and AI. But these must be adopted in the correct order. Automation is the foundation — it replaces manual labor with repeatable workflows that execute continuously in the background. Analytics then turns live telemetry into actionable intelligence. AI, the third pillar, accelerates response and decision-making. Without automation and analytics, AI is merely a veneer on top of fragmented and unreliable data.

Automation is what transforms compliance from a paper-heavy administrative exercise into a continuously operating system of record. In an automated model like Diligent One, control evidence is pulled directly from IT environments via pre-built connectors, mapped to frameworks such as NIST 800-53, and used to drive workflows dynamically. If a control test fails, the platform assigns ownership, initiates remediation, updates the plan of action and milestones (POA&M), and reflects the change instantly on the posture dashboard — no manual intervention required.

This is not theoretical. This is the new standard for mission-ready compliance.

Why Federal Leaders Should Embrace Automation

The case for automation is not just operational but also strategic and financial:

Automation lowers cost and maximizes human capital: It’s significant—for example, organizations with portfolios of at least 15 to 20 systems are realizing $1M+ in annual savings, can typically reduce authorization cycles from nine to five months, reduce the effort required to support audits by about 25-35%, and no longer need to rely on labor-intensive programs to track and manipulate data manually. Instead, both federal employees and contractors can be redeployed to higher-order mission work, such as architecting threat-informed security controls or advancing Zero-Trust initiatives.

It reduces both tactical and strategic risks: Every manual handoff introduces opportunities for error or exposure. Automating evidence collection and control validation minimizes the attack surface, enhances audit readiness, and shortens the time between control failure and remediation. Clinging to outdated, static processes is no longer an option, as the cyber threat landscape is dynamic, regulatory pressure is ongoing, and continuous monitoring is not merely a goal, but an evolving expectation of the current administration. The imperative is to implement a tool that operates in FedRAMP- and Department of War-authorized environments to maintain data sovereignty.

It delivers immediate time-to-value: Agencies that adopt cloud-based, FedRAMP-authorized GRC platforms like Diligent are cutting their Authority to Operate (ATO) timelines by 40 to 60% with automation. These tools generate OSCAL-compliant documentation (e.g., SSP, SAR, POA&M) from live data, are compatible with legacy systems, and are powered by the automation, analytics, and AI discussed above across an agency’s IT infrastructure. Because these solutions are offered as SaaS, agencies can avoid the long-tail costs of infrastructure, upgrades, and maintenance—realizing value in the current budget cycle with a configurable solution like Diligent.

Modernizing compliance for dynamic mission readiness

The role of federal leaders is no longer limited to achieving IT compliance. It is to operationalize compliance as a living, dynamic capability that underpins mission success.

Automation is not about replacing people—it is about elevating them. It’s about redeploying time and talent toward strategic priorities and value-added activities that advance agency missions. By adopting a cloud-based, automation-first GRC platform, agencies replace outdated spreadsheets and custom scripts with a continuously operating system of record that is both audit-ready and mission-ready.

Learn how Diligent can help agencies centralize and automate IT compliance functions into a single system to manage and monitor compliance for multiple standards, security certifications, guidelines, frameworks, and regulations in one spot with out-of-the-box capabilities and a common controls framework.