Buyer's choice guide to Continuous Controls Monitoring

New legislation and smaller risk appetites are fueling a need for more accurate and precise insights into an organization's security posture.

These collective forces have meant organizations require ways to monitor cyber controls and security operations — on top of the ongoing need to remain vigilant to external threats.

CISOs and their teams are increasingly being asked to deliver assurances to executives, provide a deeper level of insight to auditors, and demonstrate compliance to a whole raft of incoming legislation. DORA entered full force on 17 January 2025. NIS2 became applicable across EU member states in October 2024, with compliance requirements extending through October 2026. The EU AI Act is introducing accountability requirements for AI systems used in security contexts. Regulators no longer accept point-in-time audits as evidence of security effectiveness — they want proof of continuous assurance and rapid remediation.

The threat landscape has shifted in parallel. There were more than 8,000 global data breaches in the first half of 2025, with approximately 345 million records exposed. Cybercrime losses in 2025 reached $20.9 billion in the US alone — a 26% year-on-year increase. AI has fundamentally changed both the attack surface and the tools available to defend it. Adversaries are deploying AI to launch attacks at speed and scale that renders traditional, rule-based security postures inadequate.

The answer is not more tools. The average organization already runs 83 security tools from 29 different vendors. The answer is visibility and intelligence into whether those tools are actually working.