The Real Cost of Multi-Framework Compliance (And How to Reduce It)

The Compliance Multiplication Problem

A mid-market SaaS company today might need to comply with SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA simultaneously. A financial services firm might face PCI DSS, SOX, APRA CPS 234, and multiple ISO standards. Each framework has its own controls, audit requirements, documentation standards, and review cycles.

The naive approach:treating each framework as a separate compliance programme:creates enormous waste. Our analysis of control mappings across 692 frameworks shows that frameworks in the same domain typically share 40-70% of their controls.

Where the Waste Occurs

Duplicate evidence collection: The same access control evidence gets collected and formatted differently for each framework's auditor. A single MFA implementation might satisfy SOC 2 CC6.1, ISO 27001 A.8.5, NIST CSF PR.AA-01, and PCI DSS 8.4.2:but without mapping, each gets separate evidence packages.

Parallel policy sets: Organisations create separate policy documents for each framework instead of maintaining a unified policy library with framework-specific mappings.

Overlapping audit schedules: Multiple audit cycles throughout the year, each requiring weeks of preparation, when coordinated audits could consolidate the effort.

Disconnected risk assessments: Risk assessments conducted separately for each framework, when a single enterprise risk assessment could feed into all of them.

The Cross-Framework Mapping Approach

The solution is a unified control framework:a single set of controls that maps to multiple standards. Here's how it works:

1. Map control overlap: Identify which controls in each framework are equivalent, partially overlapping, or unique. Our platform contains 819,000+ such mappings across 692 frameworks.

2. Build unified controls: Create a single control that satisfies the requirements of multiple frameworks. Document the mapping explicitly.

3. Collect evidence once: Gather evidence against your unified controls, then map it to each framework's requirements.

4. Coordinate audits: Align audit timelines where possible. Some audit firms offer multi-framework assessments.

Real Results

Organisations that implement cross-framework mapping typically see a 30-50% reduction in compliance effort when adding a second or third framework. The investment in mapping pays for itself within the first audit cycle.