How Savant Simplifies SOX Compliance for High-Growth and Highly Regulated Organizations

For publicly traded, high-growth, and highly regulated companies, SOX compliance is not a ‘nice-to-have’ checkbox, but a core responsibility. Whether you’re preparing for an IPO, scaling rapidly, or operating in industries like financial services, healthcare, or energy, compliance failures can lead to fines, reputational damage, and loss of investor confidence.

To stay compliant, organizations must demonstrate robust controls across user access, change management, segregation of duties, data integrity, monitoring, and vendor management, all while staying agile and driving growth.

Many teams try to manage these requirements with legacy software, but those tools weren’t designed for modern compliance. They lack proper governance, force manual workarounds, and create fragmented audit trails. The result: higher costs, slower audits, and greater risk exposure.

Savant takes a different path. Governance, evidence collection, and enforcement are embedded directly in our modern analytics automation platform. SOX controls operate as part of day-to-day work, so teams get both speed and control.

Why Legacy Software Falls Short

Legacy analytics platforms were never built with compliance in mind. Whatever features they do have in the way of compliance were likely tacked on, not built in from the outset. As companies grow or face stricter regulations, such tools quickly become a liability. Here’s why they struggle:

Lack of Governance Controls

There’s no central way to enforce policies, approvals, or segregation of duties. Teams rely on emails, spreadsheets, and manual sign-offs, which creates gaps and audit risk. In practice, that means segregation of duty conflicts slip through, approvals aren’t consistently captured with approver identity and timestamps, and “temporary” access or exceptions linger. As headcount grows, policy drift accelerates and control design varies team to team, making audits inconsistent and remediation recurring.

Siloed and Fragmented Evidence

Logs, reports, and approvals live in different systems, making it hard to prove compliance or trace activity end to end. Evidence ends up as screenshots, CSV exports, and ticket links spread across ETL tools, databases, chat threads, and other systems — easy to lose and hard to validate. Auditors spend more time hunting than testing, while you struggle to establish chain of custody or reconstruct who changed what, when, and under which approval.

Manual, Error-Prone Processes

Change management, access reviews, and reconciliations require repetitive, manual steps that slow teams down and introduce human error. Copy-paste, spreadsheet macros, version juggling, etc., lead to sampling mistakes, missed de-provisioning, and untracked exceptions. When key people are absent, steps get skipped, timelines slip, and institutional knowledge walks out the door.

Limited Visibility and Monitoring 

Because compliance data isn’t integrated, auditors and executives lack real-time insight into control health. You can’t easily answer basic operational questions like “What changed yesterday?” or “Which controls are failing right now?” Alerts are either noisy or nonexistent, lineage is opaque, and blind spots around data drift or segregation of duty conflicts persist until month-end, or worse, audit fieldwork.

High and Unpredictable Costs

Meeting compliance requirements often means adding consultants, extra headcount, and expensive point solutions. Tool sprawl raises license and training costs, while context switching slows teams and extends audit cycles. Last-minute evidence gathering, piecemeal remediation, and repeated walkthroughs inflate the total cost of compliance and push project work to the back burner.

The bottom line is, legacy software leaves governance and enforcement to chance. Organizations end up paying for complexity instead of control. Without a single system to enforce policies and emit evidence as work happens, compliance relies on people and patched-together processes, driving variability, audit friction, and escalating spend. 

Built-In SOX Controls With Savant

Savant is designed to integrate governance into everyday workflows. Instead of bolting on compliance after the fact, Savant automatically generates evidence and enforces controls as work happens. Controls become the default state, evidence is generated continuously, and the cost curve bends down as you scale.

With these capabilities, compliance shifts from reactive, point-in-time checks to a real-time, automated system of control.

Key SOX Capabilities in Action

Savant bakes SOX controls into everyday work so access is right-sized, changes are reviewed, data stays trustworthy, operations are visible, and vendor proof is always handy. 

User Access Controls

Ensure only authorized users have access to sensitive data and workflows.

• Native SSO and MFA integration with Okta, Azure AD, and other identity providers
  One connection to your IdP centralizes authentication and enforces MFA consistently across users and environments, reducing password sprawl and capturing strong, time-stamped auth events for audit.
• Centralized role-based access controls
  Roles map to job functions, so privileges are granted once and inherited where needed; least-privilege is easier to maintain and review across workspaces, datasets, and workflows.
• Automated evidence collection for every login and provisioning/de-provisioning event
  Every access add/change/remove is logged with who, what, when, and the approver or source system, producing exportable reports for periodic UARs without manual collation.

Outcome: Access reviews move from ad-hoc spreadsheets to repeatable packages that managers can certify quickly. Orphaned and over-privileged accounts are easier to spot, exception rates drop, and auditors can validate access changes in minutes using complete, time-stamped logs instead of piecing together email threads.

Change Management

Prevent unauthorized or untested workflows from reaching production.

• Separate DEV and PROD environments with role-based permissions
  Work happens in DEV, promotion requires the right role and approvals, and direct edits in PROD are blocked to preserve integrity.
• Built-in workflow versioning and automated documentation
  Each save creates a version snapshot and human-readable logic, parameters, and schedule, with optional change notes to explain intent and impact.
• Integrated approval workflows tracked in Savant and ITSM systems
  Approvals sync with tickets (e.g., ServiceNow/Jira), recording approver identity, timestamps, and risk level so every deployment is traceable end to end.

Outcome: Every change is explainable — what changed, who approved it, when it went live, and what it touched. That traceability lowers audit findings, reduces rework from unreviewed edits, and gives operations a clean rollback path when a release needs to be reverted.

Data Integrity and Completeness

Validate the accuracy and completeness of data before it impacts reporting or decisions.

• Automated reconciliation checks and alerts for mismatches
  Configure reconciliation rules between systems. When a variance exceeds tolerance, Savant notifies owners and can halt downstream steps until review
• Real-time notifications via Slack, Teams, or email
  Alerts include run context and quick links to the failing step, helping owners triage and resolve issues before downstream reports are affected.
• TLS 1.2+ encryption in transit and AES-256 encryption at rest
  Data is protected during movement and storage, with managed key rotation and auditing to meet security obligations alongside accuracy controls.

Outcome: Data issues are caught at the control point, not in month-end close or during audit fieldwork. Finance and compliance teams gain confidence in reported figures, exception handling becomes predictable, and security posture aligns with the integrity requirements auditors test.

Monitoring and Operations

Stay ahead of issues with centralized monitoring and logging.

• Unified logs for user activity, workflow changes, and execution history.
  All events are time-stamped and correlated, making it easy to trace who did what, when, and how it affected a given pipeline.
• Integration with SIEM tools like Splunk for enterprise-scale visibility.
  Stream normalized events to your SIEM to correlate Savant activity with broader security signals and incident workflows.
• Configurable retention policies, including export to secure cloud storage like S3.
  Apply retention by data class and archive to object storage (with object lock if required) for immutable, tamper-evident audit trails.

Outcome: Operations can prove control effectiveness continuously, not just during testing windows. Mean time to detect and resolve issues falls, auditors get immutable evidence on demand, and leadership sees real-time control health without digging through multiple systems.

Vendor Management

Ensure third-party vendors meet compliance and security requirements.

• Access to Savant’s SOC 2 Type II, ISO, and HIPAA certifications
  Provide auditors with up-to-date reports and control summaries, reducing time spent on questionnaires and substantiation.
• Centralized documentation of vendor risk reviews and remediation plans
  Store assessments, findings, owners, and target dates in one place so progress is trackable and evidence is easy to produce during audits.

Outcome: Due diligence cycles shorten and become more consistent, evidence requests are satisfied with a single source of truth, and remediation tracking is visible to both security and compliance, streamlining external audits and renewals.

The Business Impact of Savant

For high-growth and highly regulated companies, compliance shouldn’t feel like a tax on momentum. Savant turns control objectives into everyday operating practice, so audits move faster, costs stay predictable, and teams keep shipping.

• Cut manual audit prep by 50% or more
• Reduce reliance on external consultants and extra headcount
• Gain real-time visibility into control health and compliance posture
• Scale operations without adding compliance complexity

Embedding governance into every workflow produces faster, cleaner audits and lowers the total cost of compliance.

Compliance Without the Drag

Whether you’re preparing for an IPO, scaling rapidly, or operating under strict regulations, SOX compliance doesn’t have to be a burden. Savant provides governance that’s built in — not bolted on — so controls are enforced automatically, evidence is always ready, and teams stay focused on innovation rather than administration.

Move beyond legacy software and adopt a cloud-native platform built for both speed and compliance.