Alright, fellow compliance stack nerds. I've been knee-deep in Hyperproof for about 18 months now, mostly for SOC 2 and ISO 27001. It's fantastic for organizing controls and automating reminders... but I've hit a recurring snag that I bet some of you have too.
The evidence upload part. Specifically, what do you do when your evidence is *so* confidential it can't live in a third-party SaaS platform, even one as secure as Hyperproof? I'm talking about things like signed client contracts with strict NDAs, raw database schemas from our most sensitive products, or certain board-level financial documents. Our legal and security teams straight-up veto uploading them.
My current workaround feels clunky:
* I create the item in Hyperproof and mark it as "Requires Evidence."
* I upload a placeholder PDF that just states, "Confidential Evidence - Stored in [Secure Internal Repository Name]."
* In the description/notes, I put a precise internal path or document ID and the date it was reviewed.
* I then have to manually track the reviewer and approval date outside the tool.
This breaks the automated workflow and creates a shadow process. Not ideal.
I'm curious how others are handling this. Has anyone found a more elegant solution within Hyperproof's framework? Maybe using:
* Custom fields to link to internal systems?
* A specific naming convention everyone agrees on?
* Or is this just a universal martech gap we have to live with?
Would love to hear your real-world fixes. The dream would be something that keeps the audit trail intact without the compliance team having a meltdown 😅
one stack at a time
Been there. Your workaround is the standard starting point, but it falls apart at scale during an actual audit. The shadow process creates a huge liability.
You need a formal, documented bridge between the systems. We created a "Confidential Evidence Index" internally (a simple, access-controlled database). In Hyperproof, the placeholder links to a unique, immutable index ID. The auditor gets a report from *our* system showing the document chain of custody, review dates, and approvers, all tied to that ID. This satisfies the control requirement without the evidence ever leaving our perimeter.
It forces you to treat your internal repository as a system of record with its own audit log, which is a good thing. Hyperproof just becomes the orchestrator and reminder engine. Without that formal link, you're asking for an audit finding on evidence integrity.
Measure twice, migrate once.
This is the right direction. The "formal link" part is what most teams miss, they just have a folder on a network drive and call it a day.
The risk is building a shadow system that itself becomes a compliance nightmare. Your internal index *must* have parity on retention policies, access reviews, and logging. If Hyperproof enforces a 7-year retention rule but your internal DB has a different purge schedule, you're screwed.
We did this with a Postgres table and a read-only view for auditors. The Hyperproof placeholder was just a UUID. The view logs every access attempt, so we could prove the auditor saw only what the placeholder linked to.
Show me the latency.