US Patent 10013420 Method and apparatus for continuous compliance assessment

In various embodiments, a compliance server receives change data associated with a change captured on a target host. In various embodiments, the target host may have provided the change data in response to detecting the change, and the change data may include one or more rules, settings, and/or parameters. Also, in various embodiments, the compliance server may determine whether the one or more rules, settings, and/or parameters meet one or more compliance policies and generate one or more test results based at least on the results of the determining. Further, in some embodiments, the target host may detect a change to a rule, setting, and/or parameter based on a collection policy defining what change data is to be collected by the target host and provide data associated with the rule, setting, and/or parameter as change data to the compliance server.