If you’re building a new security compliance program, or trying to restart one that stalled somewhere along the way, this will probably sound familiar.
You run an assessment, identify the gaps, create the remediation plan… and then the whole thing seems to grind to a halt.
Most security compliance programs don’t stall because you don’t know what to fix. They stall because the remediation list feels impossible to start.
After an assessment or audit, you’ll usually end up with action plans and milestones to address gaps and reduce risk (some frameworks refer to this as a POA&M – Plan of Action and Milestones, which sounds more intimidating than it really is).
The standard advice is to tackle the highest risk items first, which makes perfect sense on paper. But the highest risk items are often the biggest problems. They require architectural changes, coordination across multiple teams, budget approvals, and sometimes months of work before anything meaningful improves. If your program is newer or still maturing, that can feel overwhelming.
So what happens?
The big items sit on your action plan register year after year while the organization sees little visible progress. Eventually people start to view compliance as an endless backlog rather than something that is actually reducing risk or strengthening the security posture. In other words, the list gets longer, meetings get scheduled, and not much actually changes.
One way to break that cycle is to focus on momentum.
Instead of only looking at the highest risk items, start by knocking out some smaller remediation efforts that are achievable right now. Tighten access controls. Enable logging where it’s missing. Enforce MFA in systems that don’t have it yet. Clean up old accounts that no one remembers creating.
These may not be the biggest risks on paper, but they create visible improvement and get teams engaged. People start to see that progress is actually possible. As those wins start to stack up, something BIG happens – the program starts gaining credibility. Teams participate instead of resist, and leadership starts seeing progress.
THE WIN: Eventually you reach a tipping point.
Security stops feeling like a bottom-up compliance exercise and starts becoming a top-down cultural expectation. Leadership begins asking about risk proactively, teams start thinking about security earlier in projects, and remediation stops feeling like a side task that only shows up during audit season.
That’s also when compliance starts becoming more than just a security effort. As your program matures and controls become more consistent, it becomes much easier to demonstrate compliance when pursuing new work, contracts, or clients that require stronger security assurances.
Once you reach that stage, you’re also in a much better position to take advantage of automation and AI capabilities you may already be using elsewhere. These tools can help track remediation progress, surface risks faster, and reduce some of the manual work that slows compliance programs down. The key is that these capabilities work best once the fundamentals are in place.
So if you’re building a program today, it’s worth thinking about how the tools you already have — including automation and AI — can support your security and compliance efforts as resources allow.
If you’re staring at a remediation list that feels impossible to start, you’re not alone. Risk prioritization still ultimately determines where you need to go, but momentum is often what determines whether you get there.
TAKEAWAY: Compliance programs don’t move forward because someone solved everything at once, they move forward because someone picked something… and then started fixing it.