How to increase engineering velocity without foregoing compliance

CIOs face a pressing challenge: how do you accelerate engineering velocity while ensuring rigorous compliance with complex regulations? Large enterprises need to find the balance between shipping fast enough to stay competitive and slowing down to satisfy an ever-expanding list of regulatory requirements.

Engineering velocity—the speed at which teams deliver new features, products, and capabilities—directly impacts market position. But ignoring compliance creates legal exposure, reputational damage, and operational risk. The answer isn't to choose one over the other. It's to build systems that make compliance automatic, so development never has to pause.

Integrating automated compliance directly into your stack unlocks faster delivery, sustained growth, and more effective risk management. Simply put, engineering velocity and airtight compliance are not at odds. With the right systems, you achieve both: shipping faster and complying with confidence.

The compliance bottleneck: Understanding why velocity slows

The typical compliance workflow goes like this: a developer builds a feature and, weeks later, a privacy team reviews it, discovers gaps, and sends it back for rework. According to recent surveys, 85% of organizations say compliance requirements have become more complex in the past three years, and about half of those organizations now regularly navigate different laws across multiple jurisdictions.

Manual processes create bottlenecks, especially when a single user opt-out or deletion request bounces between teams for days or weeks. Permissions and deletion requests are scattered across disparate systems. Privacy teams rely on spreadsheets, custom scripts, and disconnected tools. Data subject requests (DSRs) often take weeks to resolve as tickets move between departments. Manual workflows don’t scale as requests grow.

Regulatory pressure adds to the complexity. GDPR, CCPA, and CPRA have been around for years, but regulators have significantly intensified enforcement. The average cost of a data breach in the United States reached $10.22 million in 2025, with 32% of breaches resulting in regulatory fines. New AI-specific regulations, such as the EU AI Act, demand unprecedented transparency, purpose limitation, and robust controls.

Enterprises operate hundreds, sometimes thousands, of systems holding sensitive data across formats and regions. If you don’t have unified visibility, cross-functional teams waste cycles tracking records, not advancing strategic initiatives. Unclear permissions slow innovation. AI initiatives stall, or ship with hidden risk, if you can’t prove in real time that data is permissioned for use in the right systems and appropriate purposes.

To address this, leading organizations are adopting a centralized approach to data governance.

Building a real-time data compliance layer

The missing piece is a data compliance layer: a system-level control layer that governs how user data is accessed and used across your enterprise in real time. This layer centralizes permission logic so teams operate from one authoritative source of truth. It enforces permissions consistently across analytics, personalization, advertising, CRM, and AI systems. Changes propagate instantly as users update their consent or preferences, which removes lag and drift.

Consent management platforms (CMPs) capture user intent at the point of interaction. However, they’re not designed to operationalize consent across the organization. Intent may be collected at the front end, but it’s rarely enforced consistently across downstream systems. A real-time compliance layer embeds privacy and permissions directly into your data workflow, so compliance enables growth instead of blocking it.

Transcend provides telemetry-based discovery that automatically detects and classifies user data across all your systems. You get real-time visibility into personal data to power compliant marketing campaigns and AI initiatives. Preference Management serves as a source of truth for user preferences across all channels and systems. Teams can add context to audience lists and feed clean data to AI development, with user permissions clearly embedded in training sets.

The Preference Store makes it easy to honor customer choices consistently across any site, app, and backend data store. You can get and set data collection preferences from any frontend and propagate to any backend. Consent preferences synchronize across web apps, mobile, backend databases, and third-party tools. Opt-outs are enforced across platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Salesforce, Marketo, and Mailchimp.

These mechanisms make compliance automation a foundational capability for tech teams.

Optimizing security controls without slowing innovation

Security and speed often seem like opposing forces. Strict controls slow development, but loose controls create risk. The right architecture eliminates that trade-off. Transcend is secure by design, built from the ground up for zero-trust. The platform can’t access your keys, see your user data, or forge instructions to your systems. Data is end-to-end encrypted between your environment and your users.

Sombra is the part of Transcend that connects directly to your data. It's a containerized application that scans your data and operates on it. Technical teams can self-host Sombra for strict isolation. If you self-host Sombra, Transcend has no access to your data systems. Before data reaches the Transcend API, Sombra encrypts it, and data is decrypted only on the user's device by embedded client-side technology called Penumbra. At no point does Transcend see unencrypted data.

The Transcend backend doesn't have your API keys, so it can't connect to your business systems directly. Transcend connects to your systems only via Sombra. Sombra manages the access keys and can delegate to another of your key management platforms, like AWS KMS.

The architecture is fully scalable and stateless. Sombra stores no persistent state, so it’s fault tolerant and simple to scale horizontally or vertically. This enforces robust encryption and key isolation, while keeping the developer experience frictionless via an API gateway model.

This approach brings together privacy, security, and productivity.

Achieving AI readiness: The next level of engineering velocity

What’s stopping AI in most enterprises isn’t model readiness, it’s that the data those models need isn’t ready for activation. The problem is fragmented, unreliable data foundations and permissions scattered across dozens, sometimes hundreds, of systems.

Without consistent permissioning, teams can't confirm which datasets are allowed for model training or personalization. To reduce risk, teams sometimes over-restrict access, starving models of the inputs they require. Models may also process ungoverned or unreliable data, resulting in costly rollbacks, retraining, and regulatory exposure. 57% of compliance officers cited AI usage as their top compliance concern, reflecting the urgent need to align with ISO 27001, GDPR, and sector-specific standards.

Transcend reduces risk by capturing consumer data permissions for AI training automatically. Permissions and preferences update in real time, so data science and ML teams always see the full context of user consent. Moving from manual mapping to real-time classification and discovery is vital for ensuring enterprise compliance with AI and privacy regulations like the EU AI Act. You can easily create a single source of truth by continuously auto-discovering and classifying personal data in your data ecosystem.

On the governance side, Transcend's Do Not Train and Deep Deletion features orchestrate controls at the data system level, in real time. Transcend acts as core infrastructure, enforcing controls, and keeping systems audit-ready. Training sets always show clear permission states so your teams can build confidently.

This model enhances auditability and enables continuous enterprise compliance.

Automating the heavy lifting: Reducing engineering overhead

Today, most user data governance relies on custom scripts, brittle integrations, and manual reviews that constantly divert engineers from strategic work. For large firms, the cost of compliance can approach $10,000 per employee. Without automation for code scanning, license verification, and policy enforcement, compliance gaps may go undetected until late in development or post-release. This is where automation delivers direct impact.

With 57% of organizations adding new data systems weekly, legacy or manual tools make it impossible to maintain accurate, real-time visibility into personal data. Transcend's automated plugins and data inventory have helped customers discover over 4,500 systems and save 1.33 million engineering hours by eliminating manual effort.

Structured Discovery and Unstructured Discovery extend this automation to the column level and across platforms like O365, Slack, Asana, S3, Azure, and Google Suite. Fast time to value comes from agentless deployment and proprietary sampling, which make the program cost-effective. Data Inventory transforms mapping with automation, providing a complete and real-time view for operations and ownership. You get instant, audit-ready reporting for GDPR ROPA and other regulatory disclosures.

On DSR Automation, Transcend handles each step. Customers automate over 99% of privacy requests and cut manual work by 70%, with over seven million access and erasure requests fulfilled. The platform has saved customers $91 million and 1.33 million hours. Enforcement runs continuously when you pull in, change, store, or train on data. Only authorized and consented data is used for AI.

This automated governance simplifies compliance at every stage.

Transcend tools for engineering velocity at scale

Transcend is enterprise-ready infrastructure, built for complexity. The platform unifies user data permissioning across systems, accelerates transformation, and enables AI-ready data. Below are key platform capabilities supporting technical teams:

• System Discovery and Data Inventory: Provides comprehensive visibility across the systems that collect, hold, and process personal data. Discovered systems and metadata automatically populate the Data Inventory for up-to-date visibility.
• Preference Management: Delivers a source of truth for user preferences across channels and systems, with a broad catalog of integrations and customizable workflows to update user choices swiftly and power growth.
• DSR Automation and Privacy Center: Enables privacy rights workflows directly within your stack where the data lives, managing customer data across systems and datasets. Transcend handles all steps without human intervention.
• Web Auditor and Consent Management: Web Auditor scans your site for violations of tracking technology and delivers no-code detection and scheduled scans. Consent Management comprehensively collects and honors user consent, even with browser signals like GPC and DNT.

This infrastructure enables seamless, real-time governance at scale, slashing operational risk and freeing teams to move quickly. Organizations using automation identify breaches in 51 days, compared to 72 for those without. They also contain breaches in 153 days, compared to 212 days, respectively.

It's clear that embedding governance at the stack layer is transformative.

Empower your engineers to move faster, with confidence

Modern, automated privacy infrastructure lets you move fast, stand out, and grow without unmanaged risk. With governance embedded in your stack, compliance runs in the background: it lowers exposure, improves resilience, and doesn’t slow the business. The bottleneck isn’t the model, it’s your ability to orchestrate governed user data end-to-end.

When you combine real-time permissioning, a centralized compliance layer for all systems, automation across discovery, DSRs, preference orchestration, and secure-by-design components like Sombra, you enable teams to ship faster, innovate confidently, and strengthen trust at every user touchpoint.

Engineering velocity and compliance are not opposing forces. With the right infrastructure, compliance accelerates delivery. See how Transcend’s platform can help you ship fast, stay compliant, and unlock AI at scale.