From audit findings to compliant

The problem

A cyber audit had done its job and produced a list of control gaps. That is the easy part. The hard part is that in financial services those findings are not advisory — the business is regulated, the clock is running, and "we'll get to it next quarter" is not an available answer.

The client had the report but not the capacity to act on it. Knowing what is wrong and having the people to fix it properly are two different problems.

What we did

• Worked through the findings and prioritised by real risk — not by whichever item sat at the top of the list, so the exposures that actually mattered were closed first.
• Designed the security controls to close each gap in a way the business could live with day to day, rather than controls that get quietly worked around.
• Implemented the mitigation across the affected systems.
• Evidenced the remediation so the work could be demonstrated to auditors, which is its own task and often the one that stalls.

The controls spanned the core categories you'd expect in a remediation like this: access control, encryption, logging and monitoring, patching, and network segmentation.

The results

The findings were closed and the client reached compliance. Just as importantly, they came out of it with controls that hold up in normal operation rather than a set of fixes assembled to survive one audit — and with the remediation evidenced, so it could be demonstrated to auditors rather than re-explained.

A note on detail

We deliberately keep the specifics of a client's security posture out of public case studies. Naming the systems, the gaps that existed or the controls protecting them would work against the very thing we were engaged to fix. If you need a deeper reference, we can arrange one directly with the client's permission.