Get a NIS2 Compliance Checklist & Learn How Automation Helps EU Enterprises Meet NIS2 Requirements >>
Whether you measure risk in exposed information, lost productivity, or tarnished brand reputation, the cyber risk landscape continues to escalate every year. The second Network and Information Security Directive (commonly referred to as NIS2) comprises some of the most direct, far-reaching EU cybersecurity legislation to date.
The simple fact is that many organisations in the European Union — even enterprises in critical sectors — aren’t keeping pace with the speed of modern cybersecurity.
In How to Use Policy as Code for Easier NIS2 Compliance at Enterprise Scale, you'll find a straightforward, actionable explanation of NIS2 compliance for the modern EU enterprise, including:
- A checklist of key NIS2 Directive requirements
- Surprising EU cybersecurity and compliance statistics that explain why NIS2 matters
- NIS2 penalties, risks, and why no EU organisation can afford to skimp on NIS2 compliance
- How policy as code (PaC) through agent-based automation makes it easier for enterprise organisations to configure, enforce, and report on key NIS2 cybersecurity measures
Achieving compliance with NIS2 is only the first step. It requires continuous configuration to maintain and prove compliance in the long term.
5 Reasons Continuous NIS2 Compliance Matters for EU Enterprises
Enterprises frequently update their software, systems, and infrastructure. With new deployments, patches, and system changes, manually reconfiguring every system to ensure it stays NIS2-compliant is highly error-prone and time-consuming. Plus, manual configuration and tweaking can't control configuration drift, which leads to compliance gaps over time.
As enterprise organisations grow, they add to their infrastructure. With each new server, cloud instance, and endpoint, manually ensuring that each new system complies with NIS2 requirements is simply unsustainable. Continuous enforcement ensures that all new components are automatically configured to meet compliance standards, no matter how fast the organisation scales.
In addition to sheer scale, modern enterprise IT usually involves sophisticated infrastructure models, comprising hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructures, remote workforces, and third-party integrations. Managing compliance manually across this complex, distributed environment increases the likelihood of misconfigurations, which could lead to non-compliance with NIS2.
Cyber threats evolve rapidly, and enterprises are some of the highest-value targets. New vulnerabilities and attack vectors appear faster than they can be addressed with manual configuration and enforcement of NIS2 controls.
The employees in charge of managing compliance in an enterprise organisation may leave, change roles, or be reassigned. Their knowledge and responsibilities — including keeping everything NIS2-compliant — may not transfer effectively, leading to inconsistencies or gaps in enforcement.
How WTW Uses Puppet to Provision Secure, Compliant VMs Every Time
“For us, it just works.”
Darren Gipson, Lead DevOps Engineer, Insurance Consulting and Technology, WTW
WTW (Willis Towers Watson)'s Insurance Consulting and Technology business chose Puppet to standardise virtual machine configuration across its cloud infrastructure. With Puppet, WTW can spin up new resources knowing they're aligned to their infrastructure as code (IaC) policies for security, compliance, and resource optimisation at the server, OS, and app levels.