Keeping up with compliance regulations from governing bodies or your own internal team is essential for a number of reasons. Failure to meet compliance regulations can result in hefty fines, security or network breaches, loss of private information, and damage to an organization’s reputation. Many corporations today believe they are not required to comply, and end up ill-prepared for unexpected audits.
External and Internal Compliance Regulations
There are several governing bodies that can audit your infrastructure, and many don’t have to give you advance notice before performing an audit. Guidelines such as the Federal Information Security Management Act, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and the Payment Card Industry all require you to monitor your network activity, especially those that pass sensitive data and processes, to avoid fines or data breaches.
Your IT department should be able to document the policies, design, assets, and metrics related to their network infrastructure not only to keep compliant with external regulations, but also to develop a clear internal audit trail. Without any regulations governing your IT department, users can gain authorization to sensitive information as well. Keeping your team accountable with internal compliance regulations keeps your department honest and makes it easier to manage and monitor your network when you’ve established set parameters.
Consequences of Failing to Keep Compliant
As mentioned earlier, failing to keep compliant with regulations can result in a number of less-than-ideal situations, including:
- Hefty fines
- Data breaches
- Network hacks
- Loss of customer information, and subsequently, trust
- Damaged reputation and lost business
To avoid these detrimental outcomes, it’s imperative that you monitor your network to understand the state of your devices and provide an audit trail for either external or internal regulatory guidelines.
How Intermapper Keeps You Compliant
Intermapper is a powerful network monitoring, mapping, and alerting software that was designed to be easy to implement and use for small-to-medium businesses as well as large enterprises. It monitors every device in your network and alerts you when set thresholds are about to be exceeded—notifying you of potential issues before they cause major problems. Intermapper is also a comprehensive mapping software that displays visual representations of the devices and connections in your network.
Intermapper also has a flexible retention policy with its data, meaning it can retain your monitored data for however long you need it. Should you need to provide historical records for an external or internal audit, you can deliver this stored data with ease.
Network Monitoring Features That Support Compliance
Intermapper's comprehensive network monitoring features also supports compliance with:
- Network assets: show you what devices you have and where they are connected within your network is crucial to most regulatory environments
- Critical and continuous monitoring: provides on-going data on the status of network devices; this is an aspect of many compliance initiatives
- Topology: of real-time network maps provides an up-to-date, detailed picture of your entire infrastructure
- Security controls: detect that the right ports are associated with secure versus open VLANs; with the expanded use of VLANs, security controls have become increasingly important
- Risk assessment: provides an understanding of the potential impact a severe outage could have and allows you to take steps to mitigate risks
With Intermapper, you have all the information you need to keep your network healthy and stay compliant with government and industry regulations, as well as internal requirements.With a clear, up-to-date picture of everything going on in your network, you can stay one step ahead of network errors or outages and avoid hefty fines, data breaches, or security malfunctions. We offer a free trial so you can try before you buy.
For help reporting on your security settings and controlling system access, we offer a variety of other compliance and audit reporting solutions. Our innovative security solutions allow you to protect your data from internal and external threats while conserving valuable IT resources.
Get Started with Intermapper
Stay compliant with the up-to-date documentation, continuous monitoring, and security controls Intermapper provides. Try it free for 30 days.
