Evidence that can prove it wasn't changed.
Chain-of-custody sealing, assembled audit packages, and WORM export. Talarity keeps the provenance of every piece of evidence — who collected it, when, from where, and whether anything happened to it since.
Sound familiar?
Evidence lives in shared folders where anyone can rename, replace, or re-export a file.
There's no record of who collected a screenshot, when, or from which system.
Audit packages are assembled as zip files and delivered over channels nobody can audit.
Legal hold is a request sent by email and honoured by whoever remembers it.
Retention is enforced by convention, so evidence is sometimes deleted early and sometimes kept forever.
An auditor's real question is whether the record can be trusted.
Most disputes about evidence are not about whether the control operated. They're about whether the artifact in front of the auditor is the artifact that was produced at the time. A screenshot in a folder cannot answer that. It has no collector, no verified timestamp, and no way to show whether it was replaced last Tuesday. The result is re-performance: the auditor redoes work that was already done, because the record doesn't carry its own proof.
The same weakness shows up in delivery and disposal. Packages leave as zip files over channels that keep no record. Legal hold depends on someone remembering an email. Retention is enforced by habit, which in practice means some evidence disappears before it should and the rest accumulates indefinitely.
Talarity treats provenance as part of the evidence. Each item carries its collector, its timestamp, and an integrity seal, so later modification is detectable rather than deniable. Audit packages are assembled from sealed items and exported to write-once storage when the engagement requires immutability. Legal holds are applied as a state on the records themselves, and retention runs as policy rather than as memory.
The capabilities, in your context.
Governance, Risk & Compliance
Compliance
Evidence captured against the control it proves, sealed with chain-of-custody, assembled into audit packages, and exported to write-once storage when immutability is required.
Explore ComplianceGovernance
Every artifact linked to the control, the policy, and the owner it belongs to — so an evidence request resolves to a record rather than a search.
Explore GovernanceRisk
Risk decisions and acceptances recorded with the same provenance as control evidence, because those are the ones questioned years later.
Explore RiskAdd-on modules
Attach to GRC Professional or Enterprise Governance — same flat price on either.
Workforce Governance
Access review and entitlement review outcomes captured as evidence in their own right, not as an exported spreadsheet.
Third-Party Risk Management
Vendor responses and third-party documents held under the same custody rules as internal evidence.
AI Insights
Summarize what an evidence package contains and where the gaps are, with each observation traced to the item it refers to.
What you'll be able to say.
What changes when Talarity is the system of record for the program — not the spreadsheets surrounding it.
Show an auditor when a piece of evidence was collected, by whom, and that it hasn't changed.
Deliver an audit package without exporting a folder of loose files.
Apply a legal hold and be able to prove it held.
Retire evidence on a policy rather than on someone's judgement.
The mechanics, specifically.
Provenance is recorded at collection, not reconstructed later
Every piece of evidence carries a chain of custody: who collected it, when, from where, and every access and movement since. That record travels with the artifact rather than living in a separate log that has to be joined back to it, which is what makes it survive an export.
Access is a rule, not a folder
Who can see a given artifact is decided by access rules evaluated against the artifact itself, with a preview that shows exactly which items a rule will expose before you save it. Rules can be set per item or per evidence type. The preview exists because an access rule is the one configuration whose mistakes are invisible until the wrong person has already read something.
Packages are assembled, not zipped by hand
An audit package pulls the evidence for a control set together with its provenance intact, so the auditor receives artifacts that can still prove where they came from. The alternative — a folder of files stripped of their history — is the reason evidence requests get re-run.
Retention and legal hold are policy, not memory
Retention runs from policy rather than from someone remembering. A legal hold overrides it: material under hold is not deleted by a retention schedule, which is the interaction that fails most often when the two are handled by separate systems.
Audit Evidence Management: common questions.
What is audit evidence management?
It is the practice of collecting, storing and producing the artifacts that demonstrate a control operated — screenshots, exports, tickets, approvals, configuration snapshots — in a way that survives scrutiny. The hard part is not storage. It is provenance: being able to show, months later, where a given artifact came from, who handled it, and that it has not changed since it was collected.
Why does chain of custody matter for compliance evidence?
Because an artifact with no provenance is an assertion. A screenshot in a shared drive proves that someone once had a screenshot. Chain of custody records the collection event and every access and movement afterwards, so the artifact carries its own history and an auditor does not have to take the control owner's word for it.
What is WORM export and when do you need it?
WORM — write once, read many — means the exported evidence cannot be altered after it is written. It matters where a regulator or an examiner needs assurance that what they are reading is what was produced, rather than a copy that could have been edited in between. It is a requirement in several examined financial services regimes and a reasonable default anywhere the evidence may be contested.
How do legal holds interact with a retention schedule?
A legal hold suppresses deletion. When material is under hold, the retention policy that would otherwise expire it does not, and it stays until the hold is released. Getting this wrong is one of the more damaging failures in evidence management, because the retention job is automatic and the hold is the exception — which is exactly why the hold has to be enforced by the same system that runs the retention.
Can evidence be reused across multiple frameworks?
Yes, and it is usually the largest single saving available. One artifact commonly satisfies control requirements in several frameworks at once, so evidence attaches to the controls it satisfies rather than being collected once per audit. The provenance record is what makes the reuse defensible — the same artifact, with the same history, presented against each control it evidences.
Frameworks for Audit Evidence Management.
Enterprise Governance
Everything in GRC Professional, plus govern a portfolio of companies from one command center.
Packages move up as your program does. Seats, storage, vendors, frameworks, and entities scale with add-ons.
Further reading for Audit Evidence Management
Practitioner walkthroughs from the Talarity library.
- Compliance·9 min readSave a security package once, send it on demandA prospect's security team asks for your SOC 2, your pen test, and your current security policies — again. Package Templates save that set as a reusable definition of pinned items plus rules like 'every current SOC 2 report', resolve it fresh each time you send, and hand it over as a redacted, watermarked, time-limited copy with a record of who received what.
- Governance·6 min readExport and verify your audit trail for SOC 2Pull your full audit trail as a SOC 2 evidence file in any format, then prove it wasn't altered with a one-click tamper-evidence check — backed by a per-row hash chain and a Merkle root your auditor can re-verify offline.
- Governance·6 min readCatch toxic access combinations with Segregation of DutiesDefine the pairs of duties no single person should hold — approve and disburse, accept a risk and own its control — and Talarity flags every user who holds both, with ten framework-mapped starter rules out of the box.
- Compliance·14 min readSOC 2 readiness checklistA practitioner's guide to getting audit-ready — what to do in months 1, 2, and 3 to land a clean Type I report and set up cleanly for Type II.
Ready to see Talarity for Audit Evidence Management?
Start 60 days of early access and see it on your own frameworks — then buy online in-app when you're ready.