Evidence and data supporting audit and compliance gains
The mounting pressures organizations face today to meet regulatory and compliance standards have led to increasing time and money spent on internal compliance and external audits. Security teams struggle with managing the burden of compliance processes while avoiding human errors, data integrity issues, and compliance violations due to poor reporting.
The Total Economic Impact™ of Skybox Security Posture Management Platform, a commissioned study by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Skybox Security found that organizations considerably improve compliance processes, data monitoring and reporting with the Skybox Security Posture Management Platform. Forrester Consulting interviewed four Skybox customers, aggregating their experiences and results into a single composite organization that is a global conglomerate with more than $2 billion in revenue and 30,000 assets internally across its 15,000-employee base. The customer organizations indicated that leveraging Skybox enabled them to reduce compliance violations, decrease reliance on external auditors by 50%, and increase the productivity of internal teams by 30%. These gains resulted in an average savings of $733,000 for the composite organization over three years.
Compliance workflow automation leads to time savings and productivity boost
Skybox customers substantially decrease the end-to-end time required for managing auditing and compliance processes as a result of the platform’s ability to automate processes and enable access to conceptualized data.
With the Skybox platform’s improved data and reporting, internal teams decrease the time required on each internal and external process directly or indirectly related to audit and compliance, which allows them to do more with less, even as regulatory requirements have continued to increase. As a result, security analysts see a 20% improvement in their overall productivity in the first year after deploying Skybox, and up to 30% by year three based on the platform’s increased proficiency and the efficiencies gained.
The IT team, they’re spending a lot less time on the audit than they used to because they used to handwrite a report and try and come up with explanations. Now, they can just take the information from Skybox and say, here’s the proof, and that’s tracked on a regular basis.”
Principal network engineer
IT security company
Exponential cost savings increase year-over-year
Over the first three years of having the Skybox platform installed, the customer organizations in the TEI study experienced exponential growth in cost savings due to audit and compliance efficiency gains.
By the third year, they saved $180,000 on the cost of external auditors alone, due largely to the improved data and resulting decreases in compliance violations and human errors driven by the Skybox platform’s automation and scheduling of audits and compliance reporting. Skybox Firewall Assurance contributes to these savings by cleaning up all firewalls, ensuring fewer potential audit concerns. Also, Skybox enables audit trail tracking through which auditors can easily see where data is going end-to-end and obtain comprehensive reporting. All of the above make the auditors’ job much more efficient, allowing them to cut the time they spend on-site in half.
As firewalls get moved in and out of the ecosystem, with the prior solution, we had to go in, massage, and add those firewalls to start monitoring or stop monitoring. That’s no longer needed which saved half a day’s worth of work every day just because Skybox does it automatically.”
Information security manager
Financial services company
Organizations additionally saved $202,500 by year three thanks to internal resource efficiencies. The improved data as well as the automation delivered by the Skybox platform enables them to simplify process management and avoid redoing processes due to errors and violations.
Organizations have the potential to see long-term benefits from the reduced costs of external audit failures. Skybox helps reduce the impending risk of audit failures that can drive significant operational costs and fines. Skybox customers shared that they saw a decrease in failures using Skybox, while improving brand equity with partners and government agencies through clear audit trails, availability of data, and the ability to respond to audit feedback much quicker than with legacy toolsets.
The total package for audit and compliance efficiency
The Forrester TEI study revealed that Skybox Security Posture Management Platform helps customers’ security teams effectively manage audit and compliance by enabling them to do the following:
- Leverage out-of-the-box assessments for PCI-DSS, NERC, NIST, STIG, and more
- Configure custom policy templates for their own unique needs
- Unify management of internal and external policies
- Analyze rules and access paths across the hybrid network
- Continuously validate device configurations from a central location
- Automate and schedule audits and compliance reporting
- Simplify and validate changes with automated change management workflows
- Track compliance daily with automated workflows
- Automate the rule recertification process
- Continually assess configurations for vulnerabilities and policy violations, and
- Manage policy violations and exceptions with custom workflows.
Given the proven potential for superior efficiency with audit and compliance processes as well as positive financial impact, organizations would benefit immeasurably from implementing the Skybox platform.
Learn more about our audit and compliance capabilities and benefits:
“Skybox gives us ease of configuration, customization, and reporting. The team really likes the reporting showing what tests were run, what’s in compliance, and what section of the PCI compliance each test ran against.”
Cybersecurity specialist
IT software and services company
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