4 Strategies to Enhance Both your Security and Compliance Posture

Running a comprehensive and cost-efficient compliance program whether HIPAA, NIST, FFIEC, PCI, GDPR, or Sarbanes Oxley (to mention a few) is a major headache for most Compliance Teams.  Digital Defense offers industry leading vulnerability management and assessment, along with best practice compliance guidance to organizations across all verticals and sizes.

With predictions from a recent survey by Thomson Reuters,  58% of firms are expecting to spend more time liaising with regulators moving forwards, some respondents are also anticipating their own personal liability to rise, statements by other leading CEOs anticipate that budget allocation to meet these challenging directives could cost organizations up to 10% of revenues impacting profitability!  So, improving both compliance and your security posture now will help in eliminating some of these future resourcing issues, legislative worries and associated financial impacts.

Here are our top strategies for enhancing your security posture, reducing risk, prioritizing investment along with how independent third party compliance validation whichever legislation is your directive, improves your compliance standards and ability to report.

Asset Inventory – know what’s there to prioritize your risk!

The first step for any viable security and compliance effort is comprehensive, and more importantly – accurate – asset knowledge.  The lack of knowing virtually, essentially determines that your vulnerability management decisions will be either incomplete, inaccurate or both – leading to a waste of precious security team time, as well as operating with an unnecessary security risk.  Industry experts have been sighting that visibility of potential assets as number one in the process for the “fight to achieve compliance”.

Security management procedures – including asset classification, risk assessment, and vulnerability prioritization – are the key to the implementation of effective controls. Vulnerability management appeals directly to nearly every aspect of security management.

Risk Management – keep the bad guys out!

No organization will ever have enough budget, resources or foresight of malice to eliminate cyber risk. Security teams are aware of this, but convincing your CEO, CFO and executive team isn’t easy. Therefore, ongoing risk management and prioritization will always be required to identify and analyze the potential for cyber-attack, and the associated potential financial impact. Identification of where to invest resources against the potential risk magnitude enables you to invest resources the right way. Comprehensive, accurate and prioritized asset and vulnerability visibility are core to practical risk management analysis and mitigation.

Compliance Management – simplify process while improving your security posture

Simply stated, compliance management is the process of ensuring that a set of people and systems are following a given set of rules. It can take the form of a mix of policies, procedures, documentation, internal auditing, third party audits, security controls, and technological enforcement. Strong vulnerability management is an essential element of virtually any form of security compliance management, underpinning the foundations of your compliance program. GDPR carries enormous fines regarding data security with PCI DSS, FFIEC and HIPPA not far behind.  Deploying solutions which have the lowest possibly rate of false positives in terms of reporting will not only save resources but provide a greatly enhanced picture of your compliance program.

Compliance Validation – cost effective, comprehensive and accurate

With board members now taking a keen interest in independent review and testing to ensure that their cybersecurity posture is robust and as resilient as possible to order to avoid costly fines and in some cases personal liabilities, security teams can quickly and easily deploy Fortra VM.  Fortra Vulnerability Management offers industry leading vulnerability management and assessment, and best practice compliance guidance to organizations across all verticals and sizes.  We offer an exceptional cost-effective subscription to suit all organization sizes, budgets and outsourced consultants ensuring your compliance program doesn’t cost you the earth both in technology, staffing and stress!