This blog will help you explore:
- What is Continuous Compliance?
- Compliance vs. Risk Management
- Ensure Audit Readiness with Continuous Compliance
- How to Enforce Continuous Compliance and Risk Management?
- Try Puppet for Continuous Compliance and Risk Management
Your IT Ops teams aren’t just working on a single machine, or even a few; they are working across technologies, across teams, at scale. They are also expected to work fast while also considering the requirements of cost and compliance and trying to navigate around skills gaps that continue to appear.
Compliance isn’t optional — but it can become proactive and preventative with continuous compliance. Let’s explore the biggest ways that continuous compliance can reduce IT Ops headaches and help your organization tackle some of its largest security frustrations.
What is Continuous Compliance?
Continuous compliance is the process of automating regulatory and security practices to make sure that your tech is audit-ready and continuously protected from outside threats.
Two important aspects of compliance that we will explore here include the audit process and the resulting enforcement of policy. While these are only one piece of your overall IT security strategy, they may be taking up a significant amount of your team’s time and effort.
Compliance vs. Risk Management
Compliance indicates that all regulatory requirements are satisfied. Risk management is the “big picture” assessment of all risks that threaten an organization, and how a company addresses and prioritizes them.
Compliance is always a part of a larger risk management strategy — following up-to-date requirements means mitigating the risks that have already been identified — but each requires their own process.
Ensure Audit Readiness with Continuous Compliance
Audits are tough and security benchmarks change with expanding technologies — not to mention managing an increased number of devices and users as companies grow. Continuous compliance can assist with audit readiness by enabling continuous assessment and reporting how compliant systems are up against secure configuration benchmarks.
The benchmarks created by the Center for Internet Security (CIS) are the industry standard, with guidelines and best practices for secure system configurations. However, there are many kinds of security frameworks; some that are more general like CIS, NIST CSF, ISO 27001 and some that are more specific to the industry vertical or region like HIPAA or GDPR.
Organizations often need to comply with more than one regulation and implement a secure configuration baseline that satisfies each. For that reason, it’s good practice to establish a secure baseline with a common framework. CIS benchmarks, or perhaps DISA STIG if you are a U.S. federal agency or government contractor, are great candidates for this. CIS benchmarks are also already referenced as a source of industry-accepted secure configuration standards in the requirements of several common frameworks, including PCI DSS, DISA STIGs, FISMA, and FedRAMP.
Puppet Enterprise uses a uniquely licensed scanning technology created by the Center for Internet Security (CIS) to assess adherence to CIS benchmarks. It connects to your Puppet Enterprise instance and allows you to scan your IT infrastructure and assess your compliance status with CIS benchmarks, manage policy exceptions, and report on your compliance status.
Visibility into your audit readiness, as well as audit-ready code, is just one way that Puppet Enterprise + Puppet Enterprise can save your team time and effort.
How to Enforce Continuous Compliance and Risk Management?
After your audit, you know what configurations need to be changed to stay compliant within your tech environment. But where do you begin? How do you start and continuously address compliance once you’ve understood where those requirements begin?
With Puppet Enterprise’s Security Compliance Enforcement, you can enforce your desired state based on popular security frameworks across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments using a reliable agent-based approach — which means that even if a network goes down, you will remain secure and compliant.
Continuous compliance enforcement is a turn-key solution to managing secure configurations. Puppet Enterprise offers standardization and conformity at scale, while also being highly customizable to meet the varied needs of your organization.
Try Puppet for Continuous Compliance and Risk Management
Compliance is just one aspect of a larger security approach, but it’s a critical piece of the puzzle. Ask anyone in IT Ops about the time they dedicate to audit readiness and compliance — chances are they are just as frantic as the current security landscape.
Simplify and strengthen your compliance strategy today with a free trial of Puppet Enterprise: