Each and every industry has compliance requirements that the organizations must adhere to for effective, ethical business operations. Compliance can be a beast if starting from scratch, and many compliance solutions only offer point-in-time checks. Implementing a solution that provides continuous compliance and governance can alleviate the burden of uncertainty so you are aware the moment you become noncompliant.
Compliance should be a natural outcome of good security – it should not require much more work, and it should not cost extra. That’s why having a great asset visibility and management platform can get you to continuous, scalable, sustainable compliance without an additional point solution.
Continuous compliance: what to look for
Every organization needs compliance, and that fact alone can create a saturated market. Here are some key features to look for in your search.
Audit trails
It’s no secret that documentation is important – an audit trail documents times and dates of events, emails, documents, and conversations pertinent to a particular project. Because cyber asset management tools have visibility into your entire cyber asset inventory, they can centralize and correlate your audit trail from various sources for easy access and richer information.
Audit trails are particularly useful in the event of a hack. Without them, manually correlating logs may take hours or even days.
Automated evidence collection
Evidence collection refers to the process of compiling information regarding the efficacy of your controls for risk reduction. In the event of an audit, manual evidence collection requires an abundance of time and effort to screenshot necessary information.
Similar to how compliance is a natural byproduct of great security, automated evidence collection can be viewed as a natural result of integrating your cyber asset universe into a comprehensive asset management tool – the information brought in from each individual application is monitored against a compliance framework. By automating evidence collection, security teams and auditors can view all relevant historical data and review progress towards compliance with one click.
Compliance alerts
The truth is, many companies lack the time or resources to know the status of their compliance in between audits.
The beauty of using a cyber asset management tool for continuous compliance is that you probably already have an integration with your internal alerting system for automated ticket creation and assignment. While the ability to customize your threshold for receiving alerts can proactively minimize time and effort needed to course correct, it’s important to remember that our digital environments are creating an unprecedented volume of alert noise.
The average security team is responsible for ~120K security alerts and findings. When creating your automated alerts and security controls, be wary of alert fatigue, a phenomenon referring to busy workers who become desensitized to safety alerts and ignore important warnings that could result in a significant risk to cyber safety.
Compliance reporting
Whether you adhere to custom frameworks or pre-built frameworks, self-serve compliance reporting and dashboards can empower your security teams to stay proactive and vigilant about how your team is tracking towards their compliance goals.
Because cyber asset management tools can help you identify gaps in security, you can also leverage this functionality to see which frameworks are affected by those gaps. With comprehensive reporting, you’ll also be able to understand how your compliance controls function in relation to the rest of your cyber asset environment.
How JupiterOne helps with continuous compliance
Although they are traditional, point-in-time solutions no longer meet the demands of today’s complex, dynamic cloud environments or attend to the ever-present threat of cyber attacks and data privacy risks like continuous compliance solutions do. Whether you choose a compliance-only solution or a cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) solution with GRC capabilities, prioritizing continuous compliance is key to ensuring your organization is meeting the appropriate security standards.
Because JupiterOne integrates with your entire cyber asset environment in real time, you can either zoom out to understand how your compliance tracks across all apps and cloud providers or dig down into asset-level data. Furthermore, users can either leverage pre-built frameworks without sacrificing visibility or create customized security controls to meet the needs of your specific organization.
To learn more about JupiterOne for compliance, check out our case studies with Esper and Codoxo. To achieve continuous compliance with JupiterOne, talk to our team.
