Unified Evidence Generation Pipelines for Continuous Enterprise Assurance

Abstract

It is a paradigm shift in software governance whereby the continuous enterprise Assurance (CEA) replaces point-in-time compliance auditing. The present paper aims to recommend and discuss Unified Evidence Generation Pipelines (UEGP), an extensive framework that aims at automatically correlating functional validation, performance validation, and security validation and generating audit-ready assurance artifacts. By 2025, enterprise systems are expected to have an unmatched speed, with release times as short as hours, but despite this, collecting evidence remains a bottleneck with up to 30 percent of engineering bandwidth. The proposed version of the UEGP model reduces the time to prepare the audit by approximately 85 percent and compliance drift by 92 percent through the application of autonomous evidence collectors and immutable ledger integration. This study based on the findings of 50 enterprise case studies confirms the effectiveness of incorporating Governance-Level Quality Architecture directly into the CI/CD fabric. The results show that unified pipelines are not only able to guarantee uniformity in regulatory compliance with other regulations like ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II but also lower the Total Cost of Quality (CoQ) by substantial percentages.