
Audit Readiness Checklist
Quickly assess whether your access controls are truly audit-ready and uncover where missing documentation, standing privilege, or weak evidence trails may put SOC 2, ISO 27001, or HIPAA compliance at risk.
This Audit Readiness Checklist helps you evaluate the strength of your access control program from an auditor’s perspective. By reviewing how access is granted, approved, used, monitored, and revoked, you can quickly identify gaps that slow audits down and increase risk.
Use this checklist to pinpoint your highest-impact remediation areas and build a clear roadmap toward stronger access governance and continuous audit evidence.
What You’ll Learn Inside
This checklist walks you through the key indicators of audit-ready access controls. You’ll evaluate areas such as:
- Whether you can produce a complete access inventory (including humans, service accounts, and AI identities)
- Where privileged access is still standing, broad, or long-lived
- Whether privileged access is granted Just-in-Time and expires automatically
- How consistently access requests and approvals are documented and auditable
- Whether privileged actions are centrally logged and traceable to an access request
- Whether audit evidence can be generated continuously and not just during audit season
By working through each section, you’ll come away with:
- A clear view of where audit evidence is missing or incomplete
- A simple snapshot of your biggest access control gaps
- A practical starting point for improving audit readiness across SOC 2 / ISO / HIPAA
Who Should Use This Checklist
This resource is ideal for:
- Security & compliance leaders preparing for audits
- IAM and access governance owners
- Cloud security, platform engineering, DevOps & SRE teams supporting production access
If you’re working toward stronger least privilege, better audit evidence, or more reliable access controls, this checklist gives you a fast and practical benchmark.
About Apono
Apono helps security teams reduce audit risk by enforcing Just-in-Time and Just-Enough access across cloud and infrastructure — for both human and non-human identities — while generating the evidence auditors expect.
Want a deeper look at your audit readiness?
👉 Get a personalized audit readiness assessment.