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The Context
Security configuration assessment, approved hardening policy, and data security management are extremely important for today’s organizations.
The reason being that information technology has percolated across all the layers of modern businesses and is the driving force behind the innovations and consistent growth. The changing dynamics of IT and business processes, however, has increased the IT vulnerability. This is especially true when organizations have a vast and distributed IT infrastructure.
In this context it is extremely important
- To have an enterprise-wide mechanism in place to conduct security configuration assessments
- To perform security audits with minimal human intervention and provide an information security audit report that mentions the non-compliances against the compliance requirements as per the approved hardening policy
The necessity to deploy Security Compliance Management (SCM): 3 predominant use case scenarios
Scenario 1
IT administrators always try to build up a strong IT ecosystem to flag off suspicious profiles, prevent compromise of data assets and make sure that they are audit ready.
And to remain audit-ready, the compliance status of the organization’s technical system configurations and individual IT elements need to be assessed continuously. Any gap or security vulnerability in the technical system configuration can increase information security risks. So, it is mandatory to identify and close the vulnerabilities on time to prevent any untoward incident.
To address this, ARCON | Security Compliance Management (SCM) is deployed, and the compliance status of the security measures and the technical system configurations are incorporated at the enterprise level. It is also applied to the individual IT elements that can be assessed continuously. SCM’s Risk (information security) Control helps organizations to identify the gaps in time that induce the information security risks. It allows the organization to close such possible vulnerabilities in a timely manner.
Scenario 2
Given a situation where an organization has implemented robust access control mechanisms along with stringent IT policies, but there is no regular monitoring of the end-user activities-whether they are following the guidelines or not. Can we consider that the organization is compliant with IT security standards? There has to be a strict and well-defined process that regularly reviews the levels of IT risks in the entire ecosystem.
ARCON | Security Compliance Management (SCM) tool’s Automatic Risk Review feature automates the process of reviewing IT risks by generating detailed reports of end-user activities during a given date, time, and location. Moreover, the assessments of the risk factors performed for single or multiple IT elements are done in real-time. As a result, the organization maintains audit readiness and complies with IT security mandates.
Scenario 3
What happens if an organization needs to alter or customize its system hardening policy all of a sudden? There could be multiple conditions like a change of IT workflow, a change in IT operational policy, or any change in IT setup (eg. transition to a cloud platform) that could affect IT security posture. Now, this alteration could be time-consuming and tedious if done manually. Furthermore, any human error could unknowingly expose the IT security vulnerability to any cyber criminal.
ARCON | Security Compliance Management (SCM) tool’s Baseline Policy Manager helps organizations with a proper security management process that involves instant customizations and configurations of policies. In lieu of manual intervention, it centralizes and automates the process of policy alternation and its lifecycle in a secure way. Moreover, the SCM tool has in-built support for information security configurations for different technologies such as operating systems, databases, web servers, and network devices, etc.
Conclusion
Information security risk visibility is sought by global organizations to ensure comprehensive compliance with regulatory requirements. The Security Compliance Management (SCM) solution not only builds the foundation of robust compliance but also offers automated risk management mechanisms for every critical technology platform.
