A single custody audit tells you whether your architecture works today. It does not tell you whether it will work in six months or two years.
Most holders treat validation as a one-time event. They complete an audit, implement the recommendations, and assume the job is done. That assumption is where the next failure gets planted.
Here's what changes after the audit: Your life. Your capital. Your co-signers' availability. Your software stack. Your jurisdiction. Your family structure. None of these stay static. Your custody architecture was validated against a snapshot of conditions that no longer holds.
The purpose of an audit is not to produce a report and stop. It is to establish a baseline and then maintain alignment between that baseline and reality over time. That maintenance is cadence.
Cadence means scheduled re-validation. Quarterly or annual reviews that answer: Does our setup still match our current threat model? Can our recovery procedures still be executed by the people we've designated? Have we introduced new single points of failure through operational drift? Are our backups still readable and our devices still on supported firmware?
Without cadence, the best audit in the world becomes obsolete. The multisig that was correctly distributed last year may now depend on a co-signer who moved to a different country and is no longer reliably reachable. The backup that was validated may have been stored in a location that no longer exists after a relocation. The documentation that was clear to your spouse may no longer match the updated wallet software.
Professional custody architecture treats the initial audit as phase one. Phase two is the calendar: recurring validation sessions that catch drift before it becomes failure. Those sessions don't need to be as intensive as the first audit. They need to be consistent. They need to re-test recovery with the same participants. They need to verify that key distribution, backup accessibility, and procedural clarity still hold.
The alternative is to wait until something goes wrong and discover, in a crisis, that your validated setup has quietly become invalid. By then the cost of correction is measured in stress, delay, and sometimes permanent loss.
From audit to cadence is the shift from "we fixed it once" to "we keep it working." That shift is what turns custody into infrastructure instead of a one-off project.