Compliance as code

Transform compliance into continuous practice

Port transforms compliance from a manual, reactive burden into an automated, continuous, and measurable practice.

Introduction

Compliance is critical, but most organizations still rely on outdated, manual methods:

• Spreadsheets to track controls and audit status,
• Email threads to gather evidence,
• Periodic checklists disconnected from production systems.

This creates painful audits, stale evidence, and gaps between what's documented and what's actually happening in production.
By the time auditors arrive, teams scramble to collect last-minute proof of compliance.

Compliance-as-code changes this by embedding compliance directly into your engineering workflows.
With Port, compliance becomes:

• Continuous – Evidence updates automatically as systems change.
• Automated – Manual tasks are replaced with integrations and workflows.
• Contextual – Controls map directly to services, teams, and owners.
• Actionable – Non-compliance triggers immediate alerts and remediation.

The result: always audit-ready, with reduced costs, faster certification cycles, and lower regulatory risk.

Why traditional compliance fails

Challenge	Legacy Approach	Impact
Stale evidence	Evidence gathered manually at audit time	Last-minute scrambles, audit failures
No system integration	Compliance tracked outside production systems	Hidden gaps between paper controls and reality
Siloed data	Spreadsheets scattered across teams	No single source of truth
Reactive discovery	Gaps found only during audits	Costly, high-risk surprises
High overhead	Weeks spent preparing evidence manually	Slower product delivery, higher costs

Problem

Compliance is treated as a static checkbox exercise instead of a living, continuous practice.

Port's approach: compliance built into your platform

Port makes compliance part of your internal developer platform, using the same building blocks that manage services, security, and ownership.
This aligns compliance work with how engineering teams already operate.

Port Pillar	Role in compliance-as-code
Blueprints	Model compliance entities: services, controls, audits, and evidence.
Scorecards	Measure compliance maturity and track control performance in real-time.
Automations	Trigger actions when controls fail or gaps are found.
Integrations	Ingest data from cloud, code, and security tools for continuous updates.
Dashboards	Visualize compliance status for executives, auditors, and teams.

Key idea

Compliance isn't a separate process—it lives alongside service ownership, vulnerabilities, and risk in the same Port platform.

Step 1: map compliance to real systems

The foundation of compliance-as-code is mapping controls to the actual services and teams they affect.

With Port:

• Use Blueprints to define core compliance entities:
  • Service – applications, APIs, infrastructure components.
  • Control – specific compliance requirement (e.g., encryption at rest, branch protection).
  • Audit Evidence – proof items such as logs, screenshots, or test reports.
• Link services to their controls using relations.
• Tag services with key metadata:
  • Regulatory scope (SOC 2, PCI, HIPAA, GDPR),
  • Data sensitivity (PII, payment data, internal-only),
  • Criticality (customer-facing, revenue-generating, internal).

This creates a single source of truth for compliance across the organization.

Example:

• A PCI DSS encryption control is linked to all services that store cardholder data.
• Ownership is automatically assigned to the teams managing those services.
• Dashboards show which services are compliant and which require attention.

Step 2: automate evidence collection

Collecting compliance evidence manually wastes time and creates stale, unreliable data.
Port integrates with your systems to automate evidence ingestion.

Examples:

• Cloud services
  • Track AWS storage compliance to ensure encryption and access policies are enforced.
• Identity and access management
  • Visualize GitHub IAM settings.
• Vulnerability scanners
  • Ingest Wiz findings directly into Port, linked to relevant services.

You can also use the Port REST API to ingest custom evidence from other sources:

• Endpoint: /v1/entities for evidence records.
• Attach metadata like timestamps, service IDs, and compliance control IDs.

Result: evidence updates continuously as your environment evolves.

Step 3: define compliance scorecards

Scorecards turn abstract frameworks into measurable, trackable outcomes.

Example: SOC 2 control scorecard

Control Area	Example Check	Source
Access Control	All production systems enforce MFA	AWS IAM integration
Change Management	PRs require branch protection and code reviews	GitHub integration
Data Encryption	S3 buckets have encryption enabled	AWS Config integration
Incident Response	Runbooks updated and tested quarterly	Manual evidence uploads
Logging & Monitoring	Centralized logging enabled for services	Cloud logging integrations

Each control:

• Is a scorecard item with pass/fail logic,
• Is linked to services and teams,
• Updates automatically when integrated systems change.

Dashboards then show:

• Compliance by control area,
• Overall readiness by service or business unit,
• Historical progress over time.

Step 4: automate compliance workflows

Compliance data is most valuable when it drives action.
Use Port automations to close the loop.

Examples:

• Create Jira tickets when a control fails.
• Send Slack alerts for critical compliance gaps.
• Escalate overdue controls to leadership after SLA deadlines pass.
• Trigger remediation pipelines automatically for specific failures.

This ensures compliance issues don't just get logged—they get fixed.

Step 5: enable continuous audit readiness

With all compliance data flowing through Port, audits become continuous and painless:

• Evidence is always current and linked to the right controls.
• Dashboards show live compliance posture at any time.
• Auditors can review artifacts directly in Port or export reports.
• Historical records make it easy to demonstrate progress.

Outcome: Audit preparation time drops from weeks to hours, freeing teams to focus on innovation rather than