Persistent threats, new regulations, and digital transformation initiatives are making it harder for security teams to maintain compliance through traditional methods.
Most security professionals agree that traditional methods of assessing compliance are cumbersome and outdated. It takes a lot of time filling out questionnaires, interviewing key personnel, collecting evidence, requiring hours, days or weeks of work—time that could be better spent on more important tasks.
There were 6.8 billion records breached as part of 2,742 breaches last year that were publicly disclosed (the total is likely higher if all breaches were publicly disclosed).1
Other surveys show that 54% of organizations have experienced at least one cybersecurity incident in the last year and 73% believe their operations will be disrupted again in the next 1-2 years by a cyberattack.2
Fact is threats are part of our digital world. What is changing? Technology is becoming more complex, and threat actors have better tools at their disposal to hunt for vulnerabilities and to exploit them at ferocious speed (think about how powerful generative AI can be in the hands of a bad actor).
Ever-changing Regulations and Third-Party Risk
New threats often result in new rules and regulations. These sometimes overlap or conflict with existing frameworks, and many security leaders are finding it overwhelming to meet requirements.
The evolving nature of the regulatory landscape often leaves security leaders, who are already short-staffed because of the security talent shortage, struggling with a growing list of compliance mandates. Falling out of compliance, however, opens up organizations to potential fines and risk of loss from cyberattacks, as well as from third-party risks.
Our business ecosystem is already complex. Most organizations rely on many partners and third-party vendors to conduct daily operations.
From a security perspective, each third-party organization poses a potential risk. This will only increase as companies shift more and more applications to the cloud, which places a heavy burden on security teams. These teams face several challenges:
- Third-party companies are continually connected with their organizations, because access to systems and data is required to perform work.
- Lack of visibility into the security posture of third-party companies.
- Maintaining compliance requires all partners and vendors to adhere to the same standards and regulations.
Mitigating third-party risk requires compliance with standards and careful auditing of vendors. Security teams need to enforce strict controls to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data. Organizations must ensure data is properly protected to prevent a breach to a vendor’s system (or a vendor’s subcontractor’s system) causing a data breach to their own.
Falling out of compliance in just one area could pose significant risk to an organization’s business (see the Snowflake breach from last year as an example). But traditional approaches to assessing compliance are at best a point-in-time snapshot of an organization’s security posture.
Maintaining Continuous Compliance
To address these issues, many organizations are shifting to GRC (governance, risk management, and compliance) platforms (like Qmulos) working alongside data analytics tools (like Splunk) to achieve continuous compliance with regulations. GRC platforms enable organizations to:
- Scan logs and other security data;
- Eliminate the need for labor-intensive questionnaires, interviews, and gap analysis;
- Adjust monitoring to accommodate changes to regulations or frameworks;
- Reduce the workload on security teams;
- Continuously monitor security controls to assess compliance in real-time;
- And automatically trigger actions needed to resolve problems and to mitigate risks.
Extensible data platforms like Splunk are built to ingest, access, and search large volumes of data and increase visibility to business insights. Issues involving security operations and IT operations, for example, are much easier to resolve with data-driven insight, which enables organizations to solve these problems faster.
It’s Always Better to Be Proactive
The first step in a security gap assessment is to understand the environment an organization is operating in; what are the industry regulations, legal restrictions, and ethical standards governing the company’s business operations.
Generally, security teams know where their organization should be, but many of them are often unclear—for the reasons I mentioned—about their level of compliance. And unfortunately, too many never realize they have a security gap until they fail an audit or suffer a breach. Implementing compliance automation and data analytics platforms is a proactive way to strengthen cybersecurity and avoid being blindsided.
Staying informed on the latest mandated regulations is an uphill battle. Working with partners that follow and understand these mandates can enable security teams to stay focused on keeping their customers, data and organization secure,
To learn more about how ePlus can help your organization meet its compliance requirements, visit eplus.com/compliance-services
For more information on the compliance automation solutions, check out this ebook: “Achieving real-time compliance and cybersecurity.”
[1] “Data Breaches and Cyber Attacks – USA Report 2024,” IT Governance USA, June 18, 2024. https://www.itgovernanceusa.com/blog/data-breaches-and-cyber-attacks-in-2024-in-the-usa
[2] 2024 Cisco Cybersecurity Readiness Index, Cisco. https://newsroom.cisco.com/c/r/newsroom/en/us/a/y2024/m03/cybersecurity-readiness-index-2024.html