How to Make Your Enterprise Truly Secure and Compliant

Security breaches are a huge cause of concern for enterprises worldwide. Studies have shown that in 2009 alone, corporations across the world have lost close to a trillion dollars owing to data loss either accidentally or due to malicious attacks. Enterprise risk management has therefore emerged as a prerequisite for companies to avoid these hazards. However, such governance risk and compliance management measures should ideally be embedded in processes across the enterprise. They should identify risks, along with measuring, mitigating and monitoring them at regular intervals. Your enterprise should therefore be equipped with solutions that can provide practical assistance to your risk managers, and enhance their skills to tackle risks effectively. Here are some insights to help you put in place, a powerful risk management strategy for your enterprise.

Importance of Compliance Management for Your Enterprise

The complexity of the contemporary business environment is well-known. In such a climate, enterprises are required to comply with several government mandates and other industry regulations. And this is immensely important for the functioning of any enterprise.

It Compliance management is the process of ensuring compliance with appropriate rules and regulations. It influences almost all facets of the enterprise, because it involves tremendous volumes of data and knowledge. Hence, compliance management is a critical, yet laborious test for organizations. While ideally it should be a consistent, ongoing process, in most organizations it is often not so.

Getting the Right Compliance Management Software

Whereas compliance should be a proactive process, traditionally enterprises see compliance as something that needs to be reacted to. Therefore compliance costs are often very high even as the actual risks continue to grow unabated. What needs to be understood is that, with new threats emerging everyday, regulatory measures will continue to increase. This means that enterprises need to adopt a full-fledged view of its risks taking into consideration the regulatory requirements as well. Hence, your compliance management software should

• necessarily offer you complete visibility into risks that could affect the enterprise’s reputation or result in legal action or penalty
• not limit itself to risk mitigation, but should define and measure risks up front for your enterprise
• allow enhanced audit trails and reports for your enterprise
• have efficient reporting capabilities

Tackling the Problem of Risks Wisely

Enterprise security concerns are on the rise with every passing minute. Hence, being a secure enterprise is now more challenging than ever before. It is not just a technical challenge anymore, but is now regarded as a business obstacle that needs to be surmounted. Therefore enterprises need to tackle risks intelligently by putting in place security measures and controls that help in compliance management, as well as in the protection of confidential data and other assets.

Compliance Solutions for Large Enterprises

Security threats are not new to IT and other organizations. Large organizations generally have ‘taken care of’ the security issues with their timely investments in the state-of-art stuff. But unfortunately innovative attacks grow faster than intuitive preventive measures! Intentional attacks on sensitive data and loss of confidential information have always been a prime concern of large enterprises...Smaller and medium enterprises have also started looking at this as it could affect them too in the immediate and long run.

Enterprising SMB enterprises have taken the lead in complying with regulatory and standard measures proactively to curb threats and prevent attacks, even if mandatory they are not compelled to right now. Larger enterprises have started reviewing their strategies to look at the state-of-the-art cloud-based security services that could guarantee up-to date measures in preventing security breaches and ensuring compliance with regulations and standards.

Despite all these measures, these interventions could still be ineffective. The high cost of deploying these solutions for IT compliance, coupled with the complexity of managing various security tools have made enterprises treat this issue nonchalantly with an attitude of ‘let’s see what we can do when it happens’..

Not for long. Various industry compliance regulations have been formulated to safeguard the interests of business enterprises and consumers. Violation or non- compliance of these regulatory standards, as a fall out, could result in heavy penalties in the form of fines or even imprisonment, besides loss of reputation!

Ensuring Effective Compliance in your Enterprise

The unfortunate reality has been that even large enterprises are prone to security risks from both external as well as internal threats despite their fortresses! A framework-based, well-defined, automated, easily configurable and quickly customizable solution, and integrated IT compliance solution that enables a simple and unified management process for all compliance, audit and risk management needs is the most ideal solution these offer:

• Automated and Integrated Solution – Compliance management software provides full support to integrate with any compliance framework and provides feasible automation of all security needs. It is quickly and easily customizable!

• Excellent Performance Delivery with Cloud-Based Model – The Software as a Service (SaaS) model facilitates on demand cloud-based services with low investments and high returns.

• Monitoring and Control Management – Automated solutions help monitor and enforce best IT compliance practices without wasting time. It checks for lapses concerning compliance and audit management, vulnerability Scanning and management, reporting, asset management, email integration and alert management, user controls and accessibility.

• High Visibility – You can gauge the compliance status of each and every operational unit of your enterprise in any geographical location through the dashboard that provides extensive visibility and transparency. This gives you the advantage of monitoring the progress of your enterprise as a whole and strengthening the weaker areas with more effective solutions.

• Audit Trail - Compliance management software solutions are capable of providing exhaustive audit trails for all compliance related actions.

Benefits of Automated Solutions for IT Compliance

• Reduced TCO – Automation features eliminate all manual procedures which help reduce total cost of ownership.
• Higher ROI – With well-defined practices, policies and control management, these solutions can bring better ROI.
• Flexibility – Scalability and flexibility of these software solutions enables them to accommodate new governance stipulations.

Large enterprises are vulnerable to a number of security threats. They have a large number of employees with operations spread across different geographic locations. Hence, monitoring and controlling the compliance environment in such large enterprises requires balanced and suitable management best practices. Therefore threat management issues in these enterprises can be handled effectively only if they implement compelling IT security solutions that can ensure a secure business environment.

Top Tips for Optimal Vulnerability Management

Protecting valuable data, customer information, critical network assets and intellectual property are no longer left to the discretion of businesses. Today, these are made mandatory by a set of government regulations, in order to ensure safety and security in the business environment. 

Constant threats to enterprise networks by way of sophisticated intrusions further reinforce the need for an efficient vulnerability management solution. While there is no such thing as being too safe, with new vulnerabilities emerging every day, even those enterprises which consider their systems and assets as being completely secure are not truly so. Therefore the need of the hour is a solution that can beat network weakness and overcome lapses. It should:

• determine all your assets across networks and identify the corresponding host information
• prioritize your enterprise assets by grouping them according to their innate business-centric critical values
• establish and identify potential risks automatically and report them to the aforementioned assets
• find remedies for any vulnerabilities or risks
• follow-up on any threats constantly through regular audits

How to get the best vulnerability management solution?

Most organizations worry for the It security compliance of their assets. Therefore managing these assets assumes immense importance in any enterprise. However, a proactive solution can assist enterprises by reducing misuse of assets and can effectively manage vulnerabilities while also aiding in efficient vendor management. Here’s a checklist you can follow while choosing your vulnerability management solution:

• Is it an integrated solution that can manage not just all the functions but also data and tasks associated with your enterprise assets and its related vulnerabilities?
• Does it inherently posses a It compliance management feature which can automatically and continuously scan for identifying potential susceptibilities in your enterprise’s network infrastructure?
• Can it scan and integrate compliance related information from diverse sources like databases, file systems, vulnerability scanners etc? Also, can it further match this against compliance signatures?
• Does it provide you with accurate asset discovery?
• Can it automatically gather data from both technology and non-technology sources like people and mapping data to regulations and standards?
• Can it link assets to various controls?
• Is it able to provide an exhaustive audit trail to enable compliance related actions?
• Is it capable of providing management dashboards for compliance status with the added ability to enable drilling down irrespective of departments and geographies?

It can never be stressed enough that vulnerability management is a significant component of any enterprise’s security solution because it is perhaps the only way to ensure hands-on detection of susceptibilities in your network infrastructure. So follow the checklist above, and choose wisely while opting for a vulnerability management solution that best suits your business needs.

Best Practices for Threat management

‘Cyber security threats’ is now the core topic of discussion amongst enterprises and will continue to be in the coming years. This is because It security compliance concerns have assumed unimaginable dimensions in the past years, posing a major challenge to the survival of businesses. Hence enterprises are now focusing more on curbing threats and making their business environment more secure and compliant. 

Get cracking; threats are real!

Threats to systems and networks worldwide have been on the rise. For instance, the blaster worm in 2009 managed to shut down close to 120,000 systems in just 3 minutes, ensuring that networks across the world were affected. In another such attack, the Slammer worm infected nearly 55 million hosts per second in just 11 minutes. Susceptibilities in enterprise systems and the perpetrators of such actions are increasing globally, and IT organizations are more and more vulnerable to these attacks. 

Be it internal or external, security threats can cause not just financial losses, but can also tarnish the image of an enterprise. Hence threat management has to take precedence over other activities. Enterprises should therefore follow best practices and invest in the best solutions to manage security threats effectively. 

What are the best practices for effective threat management?

Managing threats is not an easy task, especially because enterprises today want their threat management efforts to coincide with It compliance management as well. So an ideal threat management solution should essentially: 

• Crack multiple data-centric information security challenges
• Decipher and detect in real-time advanced persistent and pervasive threats
• Detect automatically for any kind of data leakages
• Search for insider threats
• Provide detailed malware analysis
• Undertake continuous and automatic controls verification including e-discovery
• Deliver a holistic solution for both security as well as for IT-Governance Risk and Compliance that can be easily monitored through an integrated dashboard
• Provide an end-to-end automatic enterprise security solution that is all encompassing for compliance, audit and risk management needs.
• Swiftly update software with latest information
• Stay ahead of potential threats
• Thwart threats at their source

A company’s network, its information systems, databases, and processes are essentially its backbone. Hence, they must be made secure from threats, both internal and external. Therefore, deploying the right threat management system can prevent data breach and safeguard the company’s networks, systems and assets.

Compliance Solutions for Startups

Every startup has a number of challenges to overcome once they step into the competitive market. Decision-making can be confusing and intimidating with a lot of speculation involved. However, amongst other things, Risk Management should also be given its due attention. While you can certainly make use of privileges offered by IT for faster communication and quick decision-making, it is important to remember that the internet also has an unpleasant side to it. 

Cybercrime is a major concern today, because cyber attacks are not anymore based on rudimentary techniques. Rather, high-end technology is used to execute undetectable attacks that can cause immense losses to a business. And as a startup, managing costs during the nascent stage is a mighty challenge, and above this, the absence of a robust IT security system could completely exhaust your investments. 

Therefore, you need to ensure that the right solutions are in place to handle IT Compliance requirements and security needs. Enterprises have employed several tools to deal with regulatory issues, but have failed miserably. And the complexity involved in managing these security tools and applications has only added to the costs. So, what startup companies need for complete management of IT governance, risk and compliance, is an automated and integrated IT security solution.

Better Be Safe Than Sorry

While you cannot avoid the risks associated with your business, you can curb security threats to a great extent. And for this, you need an effective and efficient IT compliance management solution that can not only identify underlying threats but is also capable of implementing stringent measures to check their progress. Such a software solution has a supportive framework that integrates all compliance needs and smoothly handles the risk management process without adding costs. 

How Can Startups Benefit from IT Compliance Management Software?

• Automation Simplifies Compliance Management- Automated processes help in detecting security threats, investigating and resolving issues and lowering risks. They address all issues related to compliance, asset and audit management, vulnerability management, reporting facilities, email integration, alert management, workflows, accessibility and control. The dashboard view provides you transparent and high visibility of the compliance status.
• Reduction in TCO and Better ROI – These solutions are cloud-based and therefore help in faster deployment of services, which reduces the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and provides better ROI. The real-time assessment of risks saves wastage of time.
• Flexibility and Integrating Abilities – With compliance management software, you can adapt yourself to new governance requirements and can also integrate several compliance frameworks into one- such as HIPAA, GLBA, SOX, FISMA etc, without much effort.

As a startup company you can leverage the convenience of the best solutions for IT risk management without having to go through the trial and error process. Cloud-based compliance solutions have versatile capabilities that can address all issues related to security, risk and governance in your IT environment.

Merchant Compliance Management and Policy Management

Merchant Compliance Management

SecureGRC merchant compliance management helps banks and financial institutes to ensure their merchants comply with the regulations applicable to their business.

What is Merchant Management?

According to VISA,

Acquirers are responsible for ensuring that all of their merchants comply with the PCI Data Security Standard (DSS) requirements

And according to MasterCard,

MasterCard fundamentally views our member Acquirers as owning the acquiring payment channel. Given this perspective, MasterCard works to administer the SDP Program through our Acquirers, working with merchants to further secure the transaction infrastructure. Please note that acquirers themselves do not need to go through the SDP compliance process but they must manage the SDP process for their merchants.

Merchant Management is the process that enables card acquirers to ensure that their merchants are compliant with the PCI Data Security Standard and thereby satisfy the demands of the various card brands. SecureGRC merchant management enables organizations (banks, acquirers, service providers etc.) to manage the compliance of their merchants with the PCI DSS. Merchant management automates many of the manual tasks associated with the merchant compliance process. When organizations are dealing with thousands of merchants, the process of managing compliance could consume an enormous amount of resources, time and money. CMM enables organizations to reduce all of these by providing a single interface to all compliance processes through a universally accessible web based interface.

 

Key Features

·         Automate monitoring of controls such as management of sensitive data and technical controls.

·         Enable vendor managers to manage risk.

·         Assess vendor risk using various assessment types and a library of questions based on best-practice standards.

·         Derive risk and compliance ratings by type of vendor from assessment results.

·         Measure vendor compliance to policies and procedures.

·         Track and address areas of non-compliance identified in the vendor assessment process

 

Policy Management

What is Policy Management?

Policy management is the overall process of managing the plethora of policies, procedures, guidelines and other documents that are part of the governance framework and function in any organization.

 

SecureGRC Policy Manager

SecureGRC Policy Manager provides an integrated solution to managing all the policies, procedures, guidelines, or standards that are the basis of the governance framework at any organization. Policy Manager allows organizations to consolidate all their policies, store them in a central repository, measure the IT compliance with these policies, and view various statistics from a central dashboard.

Policy Manager provides access to the core elements from the SecureGRC platform such as Workflow, Document Management, Policy Inventory, Fine-grained access control through a secure Web based interface.

 

Key Features

·         Single and centralized repository for all policies

·         Version control for all policies and procedures

·         Monitor acceptance of policies

·         Out of the box policy and procedure templates

·         Ability to link policy and procedures to controls

·         Dashboards and reports

·         Remediation tracking