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What is The Continuous Compliance Framework?

The Continuous Compliance Framework (CCF) is an open source, automated compliance testing and reporting system designed to help organizations continuously assess their adherence to regulatory standards such as NIST SP 800-53, SOC 2, PCI DSS, and GDPR. It integrates policy-based compliance checks, real-time monitoring, and structured reporting to streamline the traditionally manual and periodic audit processes.

CCF aims to simplify compliance challenges and promote continuous verification and collaboration within the governance, risk and control (GRC) community. CCF contributors are constantly engaged with the OSCAL, CNCF Compliance, and NIST working groups to build the future of automated compliance and reporting.

Key Features​

Open Source​

CCF is Open Source.

Automated, Continuous Compliance Verification​

CCF enables organisations to continuously, and automatically collect evidence and validate compliance against regulatory security & operational requirements, reducing the manual effort involved in compliance reporting.

Real-time notifications and alerts allow fast response to requirement drifts.

Centralized Compliance API​

Powered by MongoDB, it acts as the single source of truth for compliance data.

Open To Extension​

The CCF API accepts OSCAL-compliant data from anywhere. This allows your favourite tools to send compliance-related information to it, and include it as part of your overall compliance reporting.

This makes it easy to integrate with third party tools such as

  • Cloud Service Providers
    • AWS
    • Azure
    • GCP
    • Alibaba
    • Oracle
    • etc.
  • Container Runtimes
    • Kubernetes
    • etc.
  • Version Control Systems
    • Github
    • Gitlab
    • etc.
  • Container Vulnerability Scanners
    • Clair
    • Trivy
    • Docker
    • etc.
  • Infrastructure Security Scanners
    • Terraform
    • Gitlab
    • Snyk
  • Open Source Software and License compliance scanners (SCA, SAST, DAST, etc.)
    • Sonarqube,
    • Gitlab,
    • Snyk,
    • Blackduck,
    • etc.

Pluggable GRPC Architecture​

CCF agents are lightweight, plugin-based programs which collect compliance information continuously, validate them against code-based policies, and report the results to the central CCF API.

The plugin-based system enables easy creation of new types of compliance checks and validations, making it simple to add more diverse data to the final compliance footprint.

Policy as Code​

CCF uses Rego from OPA, and Kyverno-JSON as policy engines to validate the information collected by plugins. This allows organisations to continuously and iteratively manage their organisation policies, and directly map these to regulatory controls for easy reporting to auditory bodies.

OCI capable plugins and policies​

CCF supports staged rollouts of compliance policies and plugins via OCI registries, ensuring smooth adoption of updates.

OSCAL-Compliant Reporting​

Generates structured compliance reports in NIST's OSCAL format which can be directly shared with auditory bodies to verify regulatory compliance, and manage the full GRC lifecycle.

  • Real-time compliance dashboards
  • Comprehensive compliance reports
  • Automation of reporting and auditing processes
  • Export of compliance data and reports in PDF and OSCAL format