Accelerate your SDLC with confidence. How continuous compliance automation closes the DevOps governance gap
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Accelerate your SDLC with confidence: how continuous compliance automation closes the DevOps governance gap
The Adaptavist Group
Published on 3 June 2026
5 min read
The Adaptavist Group
Published on 3 June 2026
5 min read
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The hidden cost of manual compliance
Automating the "un-automatable"
What this means for the enterprise
Bringing governance into the loop
Adaptavist and Kosli partner to close the DevOps "governance gap" and automate continuous compliance across the SDLC.
The world of enterprise DevOps has become expert at automating the "middle." Sophisticated CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and cloud-native architectures that can scale at the touch of a button.
But for many organisations, especially those in highly regulated sectors like financial services and insurance, the journey often hits a brick wall just before the finish line. We call this the "governance gap." It's the point where the automated DevOps loop stops, and a manual, fragmented process of change management begins.
This gap is becoming even more critical as enterprises pivot toward AI-driven software delivery. With AI agents now writing, reviewing, and deploying code at machine speed, legacy governance processes designed for slow, manual release cycles simply cannot keep up. A decade of DevOps advances has exposed the limits of manual governance, but AI-driven development is about to completely overwhelm existing, non-automated processes.
Today, we're excited to announce a new partnership with Kosli to help our customers bridge that gap; shifting compliance left, embedding it as an integral part of the delivery process, and enabling organisations to accelerate their SDLC with confidence.
At Adaptavist, accelerating digital transformation means empowering enterprises to align technology, processes, and people. A critical part of that mission is helping organisations embrace a DevSecOps culture; one where continuous governance isn't something bolted on at the end, but an integral part of how software is delivered safely and at speed. The governance gap is one of the most stubborn obstacles standing in the way of that goal.
The hidden cost of manual compliance
For a developer in a regulated enterprise, "deploying to production" rarely means just pushing code. It usually involves a marathon of manual evidence gathering, disconnected ticketing systems, and the dreaded Change Advisory Board (CAB).
These manual checkpoints aren't just frustrating; they're expensive. For large enterprises, the delays and overhead of manual change management can result in costs running into tens of millions of dollars. Worse still, manual processes introduce human error, the very thing governance is supposed to prevent. When compliance lives outside the delivery pipeline, it becomes a bottleneck rather than a safeguard.
Automating the "un-automatable"
Our partnership with Kosli is designed to fix this by treating governance as an "in-band" process, integrated into the SDLC, enabling continuous compliance automation.
Kosli’s platform automates the validation and collection of compliance evidence across the entire software delivery lifecycle (SDLC). Instead of scrambling to prove what happened during an audit, you have a continuous, real-time and immutable record of every change, every test, and every approval–minimising audit friction and overhead, and dramatically reducing the manual and subjective elements that slow teams down.
By combining Adaptavist's deep expertise in enterprise DevOps transformation—including DevSecOps assessments, automated security and compliance integration, and CI/CD pipeline optimisation across platforms such as Atlassian, AWS, GitLab, and Harness—with Kosli's automated, continuous governance, we're enabling a new standard: Continuous Compliance.
What this means for the enterprise
Our DevOps and DevSecOps services are built on the principle that security and governance should accelerate delivery, not slow it down. By shifting compliance left, we embed assurance directly into the pipeline, ensuring governance is continuously validated rather than checked retrospectively. The Kosli partnership takes this further, speeding up governance across every stage of the SDLC and extending that principle into production.
Through this partnership, we're helping organisations move away from "snapshot" audits and toward a model where software delivery is both fast and inherently safe. The benefits are clear:
- Accelerated velocity: No more waiting weeks for manual approvals. If the evidence meets the policy, the change moves forward faster, with confidence and with evidence.
- Reduced risk: Automated, continuous validation and evidence collection eliminates the gaps and "guesswork" of manual documentation, delivering assurance through evidence-based inspection and assurance processes rather than point-in-time periodic reviews.
- Developer joy: By reducing friction and removing the administrative burden from engineering teams, developers can focus on building great software rather than filling out redundant compliance checklists—while the control community benefits from minimised audit overhead and a continuous, reliable and accurate set of compliance records.
Bringing governance into the loop
At Adaptavist, we believe that continuous governance should be an integral part of DevSecOps processes, not an afterthought. As Ben Boswell, our Global Head of Sales, puts it:
Teams automate everything up to deployment, only to hand over to manual change boards. By partnering with Kosli, we’re helping organisations bring governance into the DevOps workflow itself. The result is real-time auditability and faster, safer releases.
Ben Boswell
Global Head of Sales at Adaptavist
Ready to accelerate your SDLC?
The goal of DevOps has always been to deliver value to customers faster and more reliably. By embedding continuous compliance automation throughout the SDLC, we're finally removing the governance friction that has held regulated industries back, enabling teams to deliver faster with the confidence that comes from continuous, evidence-based assurance and to thrive in the era of AI-assisted delivery.
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