Quick Answer: What is a compliance automation platform? #
A compliance automation platform helps organizations automatically enforce, monitor, and document compliance with regulatory and internal data policies. It integrates with your data stack to detect risks, apply rules, and generate audit trails in real-time, reducing manual effort and the risk of non-compliance.
This centralizes policy management across systems, supports continuous compliance, and scales governance across increasingly complex data environments.
Up next, we’ll explore how to strengthen your organization’s compliance posture and automate it for scale. We’ll also see how a metadata foundation, along with a platform that enables you to use rule-based compliance checks, can automate compliance for your entire data estate.
Table of contents #
- Compliance automation platform explained
- What are the key aspects of data compliance automation?
- What role does data governance play in compliance automation?
- How can Atlan help with compliance automation?
- Final thoughts on compliance automation platform
- Compliance automation platform: Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
Compliance automation platform explained #
A compliance automation platform is a system that automates the processes required to comply with data privacy, protection, and security regulations like HIPAA, GDPR, and CCPA, among others. These platforms help organizations define rules, monitor adherence, and maintain up-to-date records to meet regulatory requirements across industries.
Every organization deals with data directives or regulations it needs to comply. Traditionally, the process of ensuring compliance with data privacy and security could be done manually, as there were no strict laws and regulations governing the use of data.
This space changed as industries like finance, banking, healthcare, insurance, etc., went almost completely digital. As a result, public scrutiny of data practices has intensified, and regulatory complexity has increased. Landmark regulations like GDPR and CCPA now demand that companies implement strict controls over how they collect, store, and use data.
To stay compliant, organizations must adopt tools that can automate core compliance workflows, track data across systems, and offer continuous visibility into risk.
A compliance automation platform reduces manual oversight, flags policy violations in real-time, and helps teams avoid costly penalties, like those faced by Zoom, DoorDash, Uber, Sephora, among hundreds of others, for non-compliance with privacy laws.
What are the key aspects of data compliance automation? #
To comply with data regulations, you need to protect your data both internally within your organization and when you share it outside the organization.
For automating compliance, first you need to assess your organization’s compliance posture by trying to answer these questions:
- What data laws and regulations does your organization need to comply with?
- Where and how is data stored in your organization?
- Who has access to data, for how long, and at what granularity?
- When and how are systems or employees accessing data?
- What consents do you have from the consumers (if you’re dealing with consumer data)?
- How is data being shared outside the organization?
To answer these questions, you will need a good understanding of the laws and regulations that apply to the industry your organization operates in and the data architecture and flows within your organization.
Moreover, you will also need a data governance system and a metadata foundation that lets you automate data compliance, which we will talk about in the next section.
What role does data governance play in compliance automation? #
A compliance automation platform relies on data governance to enforce policies, ownership, and control mechanisms required to comply with data regulations.
Data governance is a holistic process that helps define subprocesses, such as data access management, audit trail implementation, data classification, data quality management, and data masking, to comply with specific laws and regulations.
While many of these can be handled manually, you’ll end up with a large number of people managing them, and eventually, it’ll become unscalable due to monetary and complexity constraints.
This is why automating data governance-related activities is important. Here are some examples of how a compliance automation platform can scale data governance:
- Data governance & compliance policies as code: Define governance rules and compliance policies as code using declarative constructs, enabling you to create easily replicable and evolvable policies that can be tracked and reused over time.
- Visual and automated data lineage: Get a full view of where the data is coming from, how it has been processed, and how it has been exposed after processing. This strengthens your compliance posture because it makes it easy to pinpoint compliance issues and visually perform impact analysis.
- Data classification & tag propagation: Automatically classify data based on pre-defined rules and AI-based classification algorithms combined with source-based data asset tag propagation for tag-based access control and compliance rules.
- Compliance dashboards: See how any of the compliance and governance policies and rules are performing across the data estate of the organization, with highlights, notifications, and alerts for the issues that need to be fixed.
- Identity management & access control: Have consistent access management controls across your data ecosystem using a singular identity provider, along with a System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) implemented.
While these are key examples of governance and compliance automation, there are many more, all of which share a common need – a metadata foundation that can be leveraged for automation. This is the essence of metadata activation or metadata-based automation. That’s where a tool like Atlan can be particularly helpful.
In the next section, let’s explore how it can and has helped various organizations with governance and compliance automation, essentially serving as a compliance automation platform for them.
How can Atlan help with compliance automation? #
Atlan, at its core, is a metadata activation platform, which means it lays a metadata foundation and then provides numerous ways to activate that metadata via automation.
Atlan’s features for automating governance and compliance include (but aren’t limited to):
- Source-based integration of access controls using SCIM
- Data lineage and impact analysis
- Extensive auditing
- Real-time policy enforcement
- Automated data classification
Automating governance and compliance using Atlan has been key in transforming the compliance postures of many organizations. One such example is Porto, which is a large insurance company based in Brazil that serves over 13 million customers. Because insurance is a highly regulated industry, Porto had to comply with strict data privacy regulations under Brazil’s General Data Protection Law.
Porto utilized Atlan’s automated ownership, documentation, and compliance features, leveraging Atlan Playbooks to reduce manual effort significantly. This resulted in a 40% time savings for their five-member data governance team, along with hundreds of hours previously spent manually identifying and addressing PII fields.
Read more about this extensive case study from Porto on the Humans of Data blog.
In addition to providing you ways to automate your governance and compliance workflows, Atlan also brings trust and safety to the core of its platform by getting certified in all the key information security standards (ISO 27001, ISO 27701, and SOC Type II) that an organization needs to have for any of the tools they use.
You can find more about Atlan’s certifications covering infrastructure security, organizational security, product security, internal procedures, and data privacy at Atlan’s Trust Center.
Final thoughts on compliance automation platform #
An organization handling sensitive data, subject to various data privacy and protection laws and regulations, requires the right set of processes and tools to ensure compliance with these laws and regulations.
Manual compliance doesn’t scale. As regulations grow more complex and enforcement becomes more aggressive, organizations need automation to avoid risk and reduce operational overhead.
This is why organizations need to transition to compliance automation platforms that leverage metadata foundations to activate metadata for governance and compliance automation. Platforms like Atlan offer the capabilities needed to embed compliance directly into the data lifecycle.
Compliance automation platform: Frequently asked questions (FAQs) #
1. What is a compliance automation platform? #
A compliance automation platform is a system that automates key governance tasks (access control, data classification, and policy enforcement) to help organizations meet regulatory obligations at scale.
2. Why do organizations need a compliance automation platform? #
Manual compliance is slow, error-prone, and unscalable. Compliance automation platforms help organizations monitor risk in real time, reduce audit overhead, and avoid costly penalties.
3. What types of regulations can be managed using compliance automation platforms? #
Compliance automation platforms help enforce and demonstrate compliance with laws such as GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, LGPD, and sector-specific frameworks like BCBS 239, SOX, and GLBA.
4. How does metadata power compliance automation? #
Metadata provides the context—who owns the data, where it came from, how it’s used—that enables automated tagging, lineage tracking, access control, and audit readiness.
5. How do compliance automation platforms support audit readiness? #
They maintain detailed logs, automate documentation, and offer dashboards that help teams quickly respond to regulatory inquiries and internal audits.
6. What should I look for in a compliance automation platform? #
Look for features like metadata-driven tagging, SCIM-based access control, automated lineage, policy-as-code support, and integrations with your existing data stack.