RealCISO, a compliance intelligence platform used by more than 3,000 organizations, and A-LIGN, the cybersecurity compliance firm behind more than 36,000 audits for 6,400+ clients worldwide, have announced a strategic partnership that removes one of the most time-consuming handoffs in compliance: the jump from "audit ready" to audited.

Under the arrangement, A-LIGN auditors will work directly inside RealCISO — reviewing and accepting evidence, issuing follow-up requests, and communicating with the customer's team in the same platform where the compliance program already lives.

For security and compliance teams, that matters because the audit process often forces a move between systems at the exact point when evidence, version control, and reviewer questions need to stay tightly aligned. Today, most organizations prepare for an audit in one platform and then export everything into the auditor's portal, re-uploading evidence, answering duplicate requests, and reconciling versions across two systems. According to the announcement, that handoff adds weeks to every engagement and is the single biggest source of audit friction.

The partnership delivers four capabilities:

• In-platform auditor connection. A-LIGN audit teams get scoped access inside RealCISO to review evidence, post requests, and resolve questions in-app — customers never leave the platform they work in every day.
• Audit-grade functionality. Point-in-time revision snapshots seal assessment answers for defensible audit trails, evidence management tracks expiration and quality, and reports carry immutable version history. One evidence set maps across SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, NIST CSF 2.0, and other frameworks — no duplicate work per audit.
• Evidence from live systems. RealCISO's newest release includes 15 integrations running 155 automated evidence collectors and 386 control tests on a 12-hour cadence, spanning AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Okta, Microsoft Intune, Jamf, Kandji, CrowdStrike, Qualys, Tenable, and ConnectWise. Auditors see evidence pulled from production systems, not screenshots collected months earlier.
• One system, start to finish. From first assessment to final report, the entire engagement runs in a single platform, with AI-assisted evidence mapping doing the tedious work of linking uploads to controls.

"Every compliance platform says 'audit ready.' Then the audit starts and your team spends six weeks re-uploading evidence into someone else's portal," said Brian Haugli, Co-Founder of RealCISO. "That's the part we're killing. With A-LIGN working inside RealCISO, the assessment, the evidence, and the auditor are finally in one system. Our customers keep working. A-LIGN gets evidence pulled straight from live systems — not a screenshot from three quarters ago."

The in-platform auditor connection begins rolling out to joint RealCISO and A-LIGN customers as part of the partnership.