How to Use Control Mapping Tools to Create a Cybersecurity Compliance Program

How to Use Control Mapping Tools to Create a Cybersecurity Compliance Program 

Staying compliant in 2025 means more than checking boxes—it requires navigating a complex and constantly evolving regulatory landscape. Whether you’re preparing for a cybersecurity audit or aligning with frameworks like ISO 27001, NIST, SOC 2, or GDPR, relying on manual spreadsheets and siloed teams is no longer sustainable.

Swimlane’s recent research report, “GRC Chaos: The High Price of Audits and Non-Compliance,” confirms that: 71% of companies admit their compliance programs fall short, and 54% still rely heavily on manual processes that stall progress and introduce risk. To solve this, organizations are turning to control mapping tools and to the Swimlane Compliance Audit Readiness (CAR) Solution, to streamline compliance efforts, automate evidence collection, and accelerate audit readiness at scale.

What is Control Mapping? 

Control mapping is the process of aligning multiple regulatory requirements to a common set of internal controls. Rather than managing each framework independently, teams build a unified control library where one control can satisfy multiple obligations.

The Swimlane CAR Solution is built on this principle. Leveraging the Secure Controls Framework and AI-powered automation, it centralizes control management, streamlines cross-framework mapping, and creates a single source of truth that security and Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) teams can work collaboratively.

6 Control Mapping Benefits 

Implementing control mapping delivers immediate and long-term value. Here’s what leading GRC teams achieve with CAR:

1. Eliminate Redundant Efforts: Map shared controls across frameworks once and apply them everywhere, reducing repetitive documentation and policy duplication.
2. Accelerate Audit Readiness: CAR automates the evidence collection process and generates auditor-ready reports in minutes, not weeks.
3. Enhance Accuracy and Consistency: Centralized controls reduce manual errors and ensure security policies are applied uniformly across all frameworks.
4. Improve Visibility and Reporting: Real-time dashboards in CAR provide visibility into compliance status across frameworks like ISO 27001, GDPR, PCI DSS, and more.
5. Reduce Audit Fatigue and Team Burnout: Seamless collaboration between GRC and security teams replaces the chaos of fragmented spreadsheets and missed handoffs.
6. Support Long-Term Scalability: With pre-mapped support for 30+ frameworks and audit-ready extensions, CAR adapts as your compliance needs grow.

Control Mapping Automation 

The Swimlane CAR Solution automates control mapping end-to-end, turning a slow, reactive process into a fast, intelligent system.

Here’s how it works:

• Pre-Mapped Frameworks: Start with a unified controls inventory aligned to over 30 global frameworks.
• Automated Evidence Collection: Capture and attach audit evidence from various sources using workflow-driven task automation.
• Role-Based Ownership: Assign control ownership to the right stakeholders and track completion across departments.
• Audit-Ready Reports: Generate customized evidence request lists with just a few clicks—ready to hand over to auditors.

This level of automation eliminates 39% of the manual lift currently bogging down most organizations, according to our latest research report.

Control Mapping to Create a Cybersecurity Compliance Program 

Building a modern cybersecurity compliance program doesn’t just mean preparing for the next audit—it means establishing a continuous state of readiness. Today’s security and GRC leaders need a strategy that can scale with the business, adapt to evolving regulations, and withstand audit scrutiny at any moment. That transformation starts with control mapping, and Swimlane CAR makes it achievable.

1. Define Scope

Begin by identifying which regulatory frameworks are relevant to your organization based on your industry, geography, data practices, and business model. This could include ISO 27001, NIST CSF, SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, or emerging frameworks like DORA or FedRAMP.

With CAR, you don’t need to start from scratch—its pre-mapped control inventory supports 30+ frameworks out of the box, allowing you to quickly determine overlap and coverage without excessive manual analysis.

2. Select the Right Platform

Selecting the right compliance platform is critical to scaling effectively. Swimlane CAR is more than a documentation repository, it is a hyperautomation solution purpose-built for GRC teams. It automates control mapping, streamlines audit evidence collection, and supports real-time tracking across multiple frameworks simultaneously.

With AI-driven insights, CAR identifies control gaps and risk exposure before they become audit failures, eliminating surprises during assessments.

3. Onboard Key Stakeholders

Successful compliance doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Legal, IT, HR, GRC, and security teams all play a role, and too often, their work is siloed. CAR breaks down these barriers with role-based access, workflow automation, and shared dashboards, giving each stakeholder visibility into their responsibilities and deadlines.

This connected workspace fosters cross-functional accountability, improves communication, and reduces the delays that often derail audit preparation.

4. Centralize Controls and Evidence

Rather than managing spreadsheets, shared drives, and email threads, CAR creates a central system of record for your compliance program. Each control is linked to its corresponding frameworks, mapped evidence, task owners, and status updates.

You can easily attach artifacts like policies, training records, and system configurations to the relevant control, ensuring auditors receive precisely what they need, when they need it. Customizable evidence request lists also streamline the auditor experience and reduce last-minute chaos.

5. Run Continuous Monitoring

The era of the once-a-year compliance audit is over. Regulations change, new threats emerge, and internal systems evolve constantly. CAR allows you to implement always-on monitoring to detect drift, highlight stale evidence, and track progress in real time.

Instead of reacting to audit cycles, you stay in a constant state of readiness, with dashboards that clearly communicate posture across frameworks and departments.

6. Refine and Scale

As your organization enters new markets, supports new customers, or adopts new technologies, your compliance obligations grow. Swimlane CAR supports seamless scaling by letting you add new frameworks, extensions, and workflows without rebuilding your control structure.

You can deploy specialized extensions like CAR for HIPAA, DORA, FedRAMP, or NIST CSF, and immediately map them to your existing catalog. This flexibility enables fast alignment with new requirements without reworking what’s already been done.

How Control Mapping Reduces Duplicate Efforts Across Frameworks

The Problem:

Most enterprises manage multiple frameworks but treat them as isolated obligations. This results in:

• Rewriting similar policies multiple times
• Conducting separate risk assessments
• Repeating evidence collection
• Managing overlapping deadlines and priorities

According to Swimlane’s research, 92% of teams rely on three or more tools to gather audit evidence, often duplicating work and missing key insights.

The Solution:

Control mapping, especially when powered by Swimlane CAR, consolidates your approach. For example, a single control for MFA can satisfy:

• ISO 27001 Annex A.9.4.2
• NIST 800-53 IA-2
• SOC 2 CC6.2

With pre-mapped relationships and centralized dashboards, GRC and security teams stop duplicating work and start aligning their efforts.

Take Control of Compliance with Swimlane CAR

Manual spreadsheets, disjointed workflows, and last-minute audit scrambles don’t belong in a modern cybersecurity compliance program. The Swimlane CAR Solution eliminates these roadblocks by bringing GRC and security into one automated, intelligent platform.

Whether you’re navigating ISO 27001, SOC 2, NIST CSF, or GDPR, Swimlane helps you:

• Centralize and map controls across 30+ frameworks
• Automate evidence collection and reduce audit prep time
• Track compliance readiness in real time
  Strengthen collaboration between GRC and security teams
• Scale your program with confidence as regulations evolve

Ready to replace compliance chaos with clarity?
Request a demo or explore Swimlane CAR to see how your organization can achieve continuous compliance—at scale.