Achieve continuous network and security compliance to alleviate audit pressure

As organizations continue their digital transformation, network and security compliance is becoming more difficult. Organizations not only have to comply with their own internal policies but are also obliged to comply with applicable industry and country regulations. To make matters worse, regulations are changing in response to our increasingly digital lives. Staying on top of these changes is an uphill battle, particularly with limited compliance budgets and legacy processes most organizations face.

While it is no easy task to stay compliant, the cost of non-compliance can be costly. Research shows that 40% of consumers will take their business elsewhere if they find out a company is not taking steps to protect customer data. Additionally, the cost of non-compliance¹ for an organization is nearly $15M due to business disruption, revenue and productivity losses, and any fines, penalties, or settlement costs incurred. Being compliant may seem more costly up front but considering that it’s almost one-third the cost of non-compliance, it may be worth the spend. But where do you start?

The compliance challenges

While the numbers may be in your favor, choosing to be is just one small part of the battle for many organizations. There are many roadblocks that organizations must work through to meet compliance. Some of the biggest challenges hear from enterprises are:

Organizational

• Lack of supporting resources, often due to limited or shrinking compliance budgets
• Increased internal reporting requirements (i.e. to executives or the board)
• Updated corporate best practices for data governance and cyber hygiene
• Disparate corporate processes due to mergers and acquisitions

Technological

• Changing corporate network configurations
• Overwhelmed with legacy processes and tools

External factors

• Continuous regulatory changes
• New partners, vendors, or suppliers

Finding compliance success

To be compliant, you need to understand your compliance status; to understand your compliance status, you need complete visibility into your digital environments. Seeing all your network devices – whether from enterprise, cloud, or OT environments – is a vital part of staying on top of your compliance requirements.

But compiling all this information and monitoring it continuously is no easy task. Investing in a Network Security Policy Management (NSPM) tool can help. An NSPM solution will gather information about your networks alongside security requirements and evaluate it against your applicable compliance frameworks. You can quickly catch and remediate any non-compliant devices by continually assessing configurations for vulnerabilities and policy violations.

A good NSPM tool will not only help monitor compliance status but also manage policy violations and exceptions and provide automation remediation of vulnerabilities. Having this tool helps improve business continuity and allows you to provide executive visibility into compliance posture. It also helps free up time for your team to focus on strategic initiatives or other priorities and, most importantly, helps avoid the costs of a failed audit or, worse, a data breach.

How Skybox can help

With the Skybox NSPM solution, you can achieve a holistic view of your attack surface to stay better protected. Our solution comes with out-of-the-box assessments for PCI-DSS, NERC, NIST, STIG, and more; so you’re quickly up and running, no matter what regulations you must comply with. You can also easily configure custom policy templates for your own unique needs.

With a full network topology map, you can view and analyze rules and access paths across your hybrid network to ensure your stay in compliance. When changes or updates are needed in your environment, our solution will validate that new vulnerabilities and risks will not be introduced to firewalls or the network. We also provide a unified view of internal and external policies, continuously validating device configurations from a central location so you don’t have to navigate through different platforms to find the information you need.

Our firewall change management solution helps streamline processes through daily tracking via automated workflows and automated rule recertification. Our automated change management workflows simplify and validate changes while also offering the ability to automate and schedule audits and compliance reporting.

While compliance continues to a necessary function for many organizations, the challenges that come with it do not. Adding a NSPM tool can not only help you maintain continuous compliance, but also ensure you are prepared to pass your next audit.

1. “THE TRUE COST OF COMPLIANCE WITH DATA PROTECTION REGULATIONS” – Globalscape, and Ponemon Institute LLC – DEC 2017