Most compliance failures don't come from a missing framework. They come from ownership that never got assigned. IT owns the firewall rules, legal owns the vendor contracts, and nobody owns the evidence that ties the two together, so gaps sit undiscovered until an auditor finds them. A
compliance readiness assessment that only checks documentation against a checklist misses this, because the documentation can look complete while the underlying access controls, logging, and encryption practices are years out of date.
The second failure mode is scope creep nobody planned for. A company scoped for SOC 2 discovers mid-engagement that a healthcare client also requires HIPAA, or that expanding into the EU triggers GDPR obligations nobody mapped. Without a consultant who can re-scope quickly, that discovery adds months, not weeks.