Simplify Continuous Compliance: How to Stay Audit-Ready and Ship Software Faster

For modern companies building digital products and services, compliance isn’t just a box to check once a year. It’s a continuous, high-stakes mandate. Done well, it unlocks revenue by opening doors to regulated industries, accelerating sales cycles, and proving trust to customers. Done poorly, it creates audit churn, slows delivery, and puts renewals at risk.

But compliance has become a moving target. Customer-controlled scans, third-party audits, and ongoing monitoring mean there’s no margin for error. Across governmental frameworks like FedRAMP, StateRAMP, and extending to more industry-specific ones like PCI DSS, SOC 2, ISO 27001, and CMMC, even a single unremediated CVE can trigger audit findings, delay certifications, or derail entry into regulated markets. In the past year alone, over 82% of compliance leaders say they’ve faced consequences due to third-party risk.

In a world where 70–90% of a modern application is made up of open source software, much of this compliance burden comes from managing OSS components that developers themselves didn’t build.

Despite some organizations thinking of compliance as the domain of GRC or security teams, compliance challenges ripple across the entire software delivery lifecycle:

• Platform engineers scramble to deliver compliant base images fast enough to meet developer demand while maintaining compliance. 

• AppSec teams chase sprawling CVE backlogs and struggle with incomplete provenance and SBOM coverage. 

• Developers lose velocity waiting for approvals or rework when compliance checks fail builds. 

• GRC teams spend weeks compiling SBOMs, attestations, and audit documentation, turning evidence collection into audit fatigue and slowing the business.

Why Today’s Compliance Strategies Fall Short

Too many organizations treat compliance as reactive, single points in time, instead of as a continuous posture to maintain. Teams are constantly chasing requirements instead of building with confidence, and the result is predictable: missed deadlines, higher costs, audit fatigue, and lost revenue opportunities. According to Chainguard’s 2026 Engineering Reality Report, 72% of engineers said that demands on their time make it difficult to make space for building new features.

Why does this happen? Because traditional software development approaches set organizations up to fail:

• Manual, reactive processes: Teams patch CVEs, assemble SBOMs, or prepare evidence only after findings, which leads to growing POA&M backlogs and delayed accreditations.

• Fragmented ownership and tools: AppSec, Platform, GRC, and DevOps each operate in silos, using different systems and priorities, leading to duplication, confusion, and delays.

• Lagging remediation cycles: Patching is tied to upstream OSS release cadences or manual rebuilds, leaving compliance gaps that accumulate faster than teams can close them, and often lead to broken builds.

• Inconsistent audit evidence: SBOMs, provenance, and attestations are generated ad hoc, while customer-controlled scans and third-party auditors use different thresholds and tools, exposing gaps and exceptions.

• Compliance tasks stealing from innovation: Skilled engineers are pulled away from strategic work to handle patching, documenting, and ticketing, slowing feature delivery and market expansion.

The Future: Compliance Built-In, Not Bolted On

Compliance shouldn’t be a drag on velocity; it should be part of the fabric of software delivery. In a future state, every release is secure by default, with SBOMs, provenance, and attestations generated automatically.

In this world, compliance never blocks market entry or renewals. CVE counts stay at or near zero. Audit evidence is always ready: no fire drills, no manual spreadsheets. And security, engineering, and compliance teams share a single, real-time view of readiness.

This is the world Chainguard enables. Chainguard products remove the burden of endless CVE remediation and compliance evidence gathering. Our container images and libraries are built daily from source, ensuring that images remain audit-ready and free from CVE backlogs that plague traditional environments. Each build ships with signed SBOMs, provenance, and attestations automatically generated in the Chainguard Factory, providing continuous transparency for customers, auditors, and regulators. Combined with framework-aligned images that are kernel-independent, FIPS-validated, and STIG-hardened, Chainguard enables organizations to meet compliance requirements out of the box.

Beyond being secure, Chainguard’s artifacts are compatible with the tools and ecosystems teams already use. Our open source artifacts are tested against leading compliance and security scanners, including Aqua, Trivy, Wiz, Prisma, and more. This ensures that no matter what validation framework or auditor preference is in play, organizations can maintain confidence that Chainguard container images will pass inspection. By aligning with the broader ecosystem rather than locking users into a proprietary stack, we make it easier for teams to adopt secure software practices while maintaining flexibility.

Finally, Chainguard is designed with operational simplicity and migration in mind. Minimal images reduce attack surfaces and dependencies, while daily automated updates keep pipelines compliant and green. For organizations orchestrating workloads with Helm Charts, Chainguard extends the same principle: providing Helm Charts alongside secure base and app images so teams can modernize their deployments with compliance baked in, while avoiding the friction typically associated with migrations.

How Snowflake Turned Compliance Into Trust & Speed

Snowflake, the data cloud leader, needed to tighten its vulnerability management in container-based workflows as part of its FedRAMP High journey. The team had always believed that security should be built in, but as compliance checks intensified, even small gaps triggered findings that delayed accreditation.

Partnering with Chainguard meant that Snowflake was able to:

• Plummet vulnerability counts by moving many applications from hundreds or thousands of CVEs down to zero almost overnight.

• Achieve FedRAMP High accreditation far faster than expected, largely thanks to ready-to-use hardened container images, FIPS/STIG alignment, and auditable build artifacts.

• Free up engineering and security teams from CVE remediation toil so they could focus on innovation, reliability, and delivering value to customers.

As the Snowflake team put it:

“It’s a remarkable thing when you introduce Chainguard Containers and see the vulnerability count plummet. Watching various applications go from hundreds or even thousands of vulnerabilities down to zero overnight is a powerful testament to what Chainguard Containers can do. We would not have been able to get [to FedRAMP High] in time without their support.”

Always Audit-Ready, Always Moving Faster

Compliance should not slow innovation; it should enable it. Chainguard delivers hardened, secure, and production-ready builds of the open source software you already rely on, so your teams can build faster, stay compliant, and eliminate risk.

With Chainguard, your software comes audit-ready, your developers stay focused on innovation, and compliance becomes a driver of growth instead of a drag on delivery.

See how Chainguard can keep your releases secure, compliant, and moving at the speed of innovation. Reach out to learn more.