Qualys Unveils Policy Audit with Enhanced Efficiency for Continuous Audit Readiness

Enhancements streamline evidence collection, prioritize risk-based remediation, and ensure continuous audit readiness, helping organizations reduce compliance costs and regulatory exposure

FOSTER CITY, Calif., April 24, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Qualys, Inc. (NASDAQ: QLYS), a leading provider of disruptive cloud-based IT, security and compliance solutions, today announced Policy Audit, an enhancement to its policy compliance solution. This update revolutionizes the audit journey through automated efficiencies that drastically cut manual audit preparation time, speed remediation, and ensure organizations remain audit ready at all times.

Enterprises are grappling with an increasing compliance burden, with nearly 70%* of service organizations subject to at least six frameworks or more regulatory mandates that stretch resources and drive-up costs. Misconfigurations further complicate compliance, often leading to non-compliance and regulatory penalties. Time-consuming tasks like auditing, reporting, and system remediation are prone to human error, underscoring the urgent need for a more efficient, automated approach to managing compliance challenges.

"Integrating Qualys Policy Audit into our workflows has transformed how we manage compliance. The seamless collaboration between teams, combined with real-time visibility across multiple mandates, has streamlined our operations and enabled proactive risk management. It's a game-changer for audit readiness," noted Sandeep Khanna, CISO at UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India).

Qualys Policy Audit helps organizations avoid security breaches and audit failures by automatically mapping evidence to frameworks like PCI DSS 4.0, DORA, NIST, CMMC and FedRAMP. It includes comprehensive coverage across 450 technologies, over 1,000 out-of-the-box policies and more than 90 frameworks, ensuring continuous compliance and audit readiness while minimizing the risk of audit failures. Policy Audit delivers:   

• Continuous Audit Readiness: Policy Compliance automates continuous evidence collection, minimizes human error, and helps monitor audit gaps with a real-time view of organizations' compliance posture. By reducing audit failure rate by up to 95%, it helps organizations proactively mitigate the risk of fines and penalties, and ensures they are always audit ready.
• Reduced Risk Exposure: Policy Audit leverages Qualys TruRisk to automatically map compliance and data privacy risks. It also identifies and prioritizes critical misconfigurations based on business impact and asset and threat exposure to show which failures matter most, where they're most widespread, and how they impact multiple mandates. This enables organizations to prioritize fixes based on risk.  
• Streamlined Audit Operations: Automated ITSM workflows bridge siloed teams, ensuring the correct information reaches the right people quickly. Seamless integration with GRC tools enhances visibility and streamlines compliance tracking and risk management, while automated remediation workflows speed remediation efforts and reduce breach exposure.
• Audit-Ready Reporting: Multiple reports are automatically generated from a single data collection, leveraging 90+ pre-mapped mandates to easily monitor compliance trends risk levels and mandate adherence. These customizable audit-ready reports for executives and stakeholders streamline on-demand audits and ensure compliance and reduce audit costs by 50%.

"Organizations are facing a growing number of mandates, and audit readiness is more critical than ever. Yet many struggle with complex regulations, limited staff, tight budgets, and manual processes—making compliance costly and error-prone," said Sumedh Thakar, president and CEO of Qualys. "Policy Audit transforms audits from a source of stress into a streamlined, automated process that empowers teams to do more while keeping the organization continuously audit ready."

Introducing Audit Fix

To further mitigate breach exposure, Qualys is also introducing Audit Fix as an optional but powerful addition to Policy Audit. Audit Fix allows users to proactively repair audit findings before they escalate into compliance issues using a library of pre-defined, out-of-the-box scripts and golden policies that integrate into CI/CD pipelines. Customizable remediation workflows integrated into Policy Audit help to significantly reduce breach exposure and accelerate continuous compliance.

Availability

Qualys Policy Audit will be available in Q2. For a 30-day trial, visit qualys.com/forms/policy-audit or to learn more, read our blog, "Qualys Policy Audit, the New Standard for Audit Readiness", or attend our Policy Audit webinar.

Additional Resources  

• Read our blog post, "Qualys Policy Audit, the New Standard for Audit Readiness"
• Watch the Policy Audit video
• Sign up for a free trial of Qualys Policy Audit
• Follow Qualys on LinkedIn and X

About Qualys   

Qualys, Inc. (NASDAQ: QLYS) is a leading provider of disruptive cloud-based security, compliance and IT solutions with more than 10,000 subscription customers worldwide, including a majority of the Forbes Global 100 and Fortune 100. Qualys helps organizations streamline and automate their security and compliance solutions onto a single platform for greater agility, better business outcomes, and substantial cost savings.

The Qualys Enterprise TruRisk Platform leverages a single agent to continuously deliver critical security intelligence while enabling enterprises to automate the full spectrum of vulnerability detection, compliance, and protection for IT systems, workloads and web applications across on premises, endpoints, servers, public and private clouds, containers, and mobile devices. Founded in 1999 as one of the first SaaS security companies, Qualys has strategic partnerships and seamlessly integrates its vulnerability management capabilities into security offerings from cloud service providers, including Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Amazon Web Services, the Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, along with a number of leading managed service providers and global consulting organizations. For more information, please visit http://www.qualys.com.

* Shnider, A. Compliance Digital Transformation Report, Coalfire. Available at: https://coalfire.com/insights/resources/reports/compliance-in-the-era-of-digital-transformation-fr.

Qualys, Qualys VMDR®, Qualys TruRisk and the Qualys logo are proprietary trademarks of Qualys, Inc. All other products or names may be trademarks of their respective companies. 

Media Contact:   
Rachel Yap Winship 
Qualys
Media@Qualys.com  

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SOURCE Qualys, Inc.