July, 2026 Monthly Product Update

What’s New! ​

Overview:

What's Changed?

Sample Testing & Evidence Integrity

Population Evidence Requirement

• Auditors can no longer accept evidence solely at the population level — evidence accepted on a population request is now required to flow into individual sample requests, ensuring every sample has verifiable, traceable evidence and the three-way reconciliation workflow remains intact
• This closes a gap where evidence could be "parked" at the population level for small populations, bypassing sample-level review and creating traceability issues in the final report

Non-Occurrence Attestation Workflow

• Clients can now formally attest to a non-occurrence population through a structured attestation modal, replacing informal comments with a legally defensible, auditable submission that flows directly into the auditor's review queue
• The attestation requires both a signed checkbox and a written rationale before submission, and locks sample generation only after all assigned services have accepted — preventing split-state populations and ensuring full auditor consensus before closing out the workflow

AI Enhancements

AI Citations — Iteration 2

• A rebuilt citations experience is now available in A-SCEND, improving how AI-generated analysis references specific passages within uploaded evidence files, making it faster for auditors to verify AI findings and trace conclusions back to source material

A-LYX Chatbot Enhancements

• A set of targeted improvements to the A-LYX chatbot are included in this release, addressing accuracy, context handling, and overall reliability for auditors using the AI assistant during engagements

Engagements

Editable Criteria for Custom Controls

• Auditors can now add or remove criteria on a custom control after it has been created, directly from the control details sidebar under 'services, criteria' eliminating the need to delete and rebuild a control from scratch when the scope of criteria changes mid-engagement

User Role Included in User List Export

• The Role field is now included when exporting the Users list, giving GRC and access review teams the data they need to identify privileged accounts without having to cross-reference the UI manually

Integrations

Vanta — Real-Time Evidence Ingestion via Webhook

• Vanta evidence is now delivered to A-SCEND in near real-time via webhook, replacing the previous hourly cron-based sync — reducing evidence availability delays and eliminating the rate limit issues that could occur during large scheduled pulls
• This will also allow evidence to be pulled in from Vanta's new 'IRL Experience' if the requests are linked to controls in Vanta. 

MyCSF — Custom Request CVID Support

• The MyCSF evidence push now recognizes CVIDs associated with custom requests, not just template requests — resolving an issue where files tied to custom requests appeared as having no CVIDs available and could not be sent to HITRUST
• This will also allow for i1 and r2 services using custom IRL's to utilize the feature

Salesforce Engagement Status Sync

• A-SCEND now pushes a daily snapshot of request status counts to Mulesoft, flowing through to Salesforce — giving account teams visibility into engagement progress without leaving Salesforce

Federal Compliance

FedRAMP 20x — New Audit Services

• A-SCEND now supports FedRAMP 20x Class A, Class B, and Class C as distinct audit service types

AEC Report Mapping for FedRAMP 20x and rev 5

• AEC reports across AWS, Azure, and GCP are now mapped to FedRAMP 20x KSI-based requests and NIST 800-53 rev 5 requests, giving CSPs and auditors immediate visibility into how many requests their connected integrations can satisfy before fieldwork begins

Federal User Data Isolation

• PostHog analytics events and Novu/SendGrid notification sends are now suppressed for all users on federal engagements, ensuring no behavioral or notification data flows to third-party services for federal users

Platform

Performance & Table Improvements

• Data tables across A-SCEND have been updated with AG Grid improvements, including optimized loading — making large engagement datasets faster and easier to work with

v.7.8.26