Using ServiceNow to Meet Audit and Compliance Requirements

Stuck at home while everyone attends Knowledge 2025? (Even if you know the best ways attendees can make the most of their time at the event?) Don't worry, we can still have our own little private ServiceNow lesson.

And it’s a valuable one at that. With tax season just behind us, the demand for airtight financial and operational controls is once again front and center. Organizations across industries are under constant pressure to demonstrate audit-readiness and regulatory compliance, not just to satisfy oversight bodies, but to retain customer trust and avoid reputational risk. 

Compliance is now a daily expectation. Yet many businesses still rely on manual, spreadsheet-driven processes that are time-consuming, error-prone, and outdated with today’s standards.

ServiceNow addresses these challenges through its integrated Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) suite, which allows organizations to move beyond reactive compliance and turn it into a strategic advantage. 

By unifying policies, controls, risk assessments, incidents, and third-party oversight into a single, intelligent system, ServiceNow enables real-time insight, operational efficiency, faster decision-making, and greater confidence from auditors and stakeholders alike.

Here’s six ways that demonstrate how ServiceNow helps organizations not just meet, but exceed modern audit and compliance requirements.

Automate Regular Audits for Security and Privacy

Legacy audit processes often involve late nights, scattered spreadsheets, and last-minute scrambles to locate evidence. These manual methods are slow, risky, and no longer scalable. ServiceNow's Audit Management application redefines the audit lifecycle with a set of prebuilt engagement templates, control libraries aligned with leading frameworks (like NIST, ISO, SOX, and GDPR), and drag-and-drop workflows to streamline execution.

ServiceNow enables risk-based audit planning by pulling live risk scores from the Integrated Risk Management (IRM) module, allowing teams to prioritize critical controls over exhaustive box-checking. Audit evidence can be uploaded directly and linked to controls, ensuring full traceability and on-time responses. Time-stamped documentation ensures clarity for both internal reviewers and external auditors.

The results are transformative: one global retailer reported a 70% decline in audit administration time, freeing auditors to perform deeper root-cause analysis instead of mundane follow-ups. By automating evidence collection and tasking, organizations not only bolster data security and privacy but also signal to customers that compliance is woven into their operational fabric.

Establish a Single System of Record for Policies

When policies, standards, and controls live in disparate documents or silos, version conflicts and missed reviews become inevitable. ServiceNow Policy and Compliance Management solves this by offering a centralized source that integrates internal policies with external regulations. 

Once a policy is approved, ServiceNow links it to relevant controls in the shared library. By making one change, it cascades compliance status updates across all associated policies and regulations, preventing outdated rules from slipping into production environments.

Organizations that adopt a single system of record for policies see faster and more accurate rollouts and fewer instances of noncompliance. 

Real-Time Audit Management and Continuous Compliance

Traditional “snapshot” audits can leave critical control failures undetected for months. ServiceNow transforms compliance into a continuous process. Through performance analytics, teams monitor control indicators, such as patching cadence, privileged access reviews, and incident response times, in near real-time, with threshold-based alerts and dashboard indicators.

Threshold breaches trigger alerts, initiate remediation workflows, and update dashboards that display current control health, overdue tasks, and risk-weighted issues. This shift toward continuous compliance reduces surprises during formal audits and reinforces the message that compliance is part of daily operations, not an annual event.

Risk and Compliance into One Platform

When risk, compliance, and audit functions operate on separate platforms, data disconnects lead to duplicated effort and blind spots. ServiceNow’s Integrated Risk Management (IRM) suite consolidates risk assessments, control tests, policy reviews, and audit findings into the same data model.

When a control’s design or operating effectiveness is updated, all linked risk registers, policy records, and audit tasks reflect the change instantly. This single-source-of-truth approach eliminates redundant testing and ensures that control health data drives every GRC activity. 

Cross-functional workflows then automate handoffs: risk owners receive incident alerts or assessment tasks, compliance officers see failing control attestations and initiate policy reviews, and auditors view real-time risk heatmaps and prioritize their next engagement. The result is a fluid, collaborative process rather than siloed teams passing stale reports back and forth

Customizable Dashboards

Data without context can overwhelm even the most experienced GRC professionals. ServiceNow addresses this by offering persona-based dashboards, such as Audit Workbench, GRC Workbench, and Third-Party Risk Workspace, that present actionable information through KPI widgets, heatmaps, and timeline views.

These dashboards are fully customizable, allowing teams to track the metrics that matter most to their organization. Clear, visual reporting also builds confidence with auditors and board members, demonstrating to auditors and stakeholders that compliance is actively managed and visualized.

Third-Party End-to-End Risk Management

Vendors and partners extend your organization’s risk perimeter. Yet many companies still rely on disconnected tools to manage third-party oversight. ServiceNow Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) replaces fragmented processes with a single, automated system.

From onboarding and due diligence to monitoring and offboarding, TPRM automates the entire third-party risk lifecycle. External vendors collaborate with internal teams through a secure portal that supports risk assessments, shared evidence, and remediation plans. Real-time risk intelligence feeds and ongoing monitoring keep vendor scores current, enabling faster and more informed decisions.

Powered by the Now Platform, TPRM unifies data, workflows, and AI-powered risk scoring and prioritization to deliver scalable third-party governance while reinforcing compliance and operational resilience.

Wrapping Up

These items are hardly the only ways ServiceNow helps meet compliance standards. But they’re six that we felt needed to be covered. As the pace of regulatory scrutiny accelerates and customer expectations rise, organizations must evolve their audit and compliance programs from reactive to proactive. With the right GRC strategy and tools, compliance can move from a reactive obligation to a continuous, value-adding discipline. 

By automating manual processes, centralizing policies, enabling real-time monitoring, integrating third-party risk, and delivering actionable insights through customizable dashboards, ServiceNow empowers companies to achieve continuous compliance with greater ease and transparency.

Now, we get to sit back and wait for updates from Knowledge 2025. And you know there will be many. Stay tuned.