4 Key Steps to Automate IT Security Compliance
A Unified Approach for IT, Audit and Operation Teams

IT Security Compliance is also known as : Network Security Mgmt, IT Security Compliance, Information security, Unified Approach to Information Security Compliance, Security Compliance software, Optimizing Information Security Compliance, Identifying Security Vulnerabilities, Network Security Download Report , Security Compliance Management Toolkit Series, IT Security Compliance Solutions, Development of IT Securtiy Compliance Solutions, IT Regulatory Compliance, Business Continuity Compliance, Achieving Compliance , IT Security Standards.

Table of Contents

 

• I. Overview
• II. Regulatory Challenges
• III. Applying IT Governance Frameworks to the Compliance Challenge
• IV. Accountability and the Stakes of Noncompliance
• V. Divided Teams with Many Tools: The Problem of Ad Hoc Compliance Management
• VI. The Big Picture: The Scope of Compli ance Activities and the IT Team
• VII. Requirements for a Converged Solution
• VIII. Architecture for a Converged Solution
• VIIII. Why Software as a Service (SaaS) is best suited for Compliance
• X. Look to Qualys for Converged Compliance Leadership

 

I. Overview

Are you confident your network is secure and meeting IT security policies? Does your organization have an internal security policy?
Can you measure and enforce your IT compliance against that policy?
Are your critical security risks being identified and fixed?

For businesses today, managing IT security risk and meeting compliance requirements is paramount. The past decade has seen an unprecedented wave of security breaches that have compromised the integrity of company-owned information ' resulting in substantial financial and operational loss while devastating the confidence of customers, business partners and stakeholders. This tide of events has led to the establishment of technical standards, IT governance frameworks and laws designed to improve and enforce security ' creating further pressure for organizations to define, control and govern their IT infrastructure more effectively.

This paper discusses the challenges faced by organizations of all sizes ' across all industries ' and presents a security as a service (SaaS) approach to simplify and automate the convergence of security and compliance to:<|p>

• Define policies to establish a secure IT infrastructure in accordance with good governance and best-practice frameworks.
• Automate ongoing security assessments, and manage vulnerability risk effectively.
• Mitigate risk and eliminate threats utilizing the most trusted vulnerability management application in the industry.
• Monitor and measure network compliance in one unified console ' saving time, assuring reliability and reducing costs.
• Distribute security and compliance reports customized to meet the unique needs of business executives, auditors and security professionals.

 

II. Regulatory Challenges

Compliance with regulatory mandates and internal security policies is critical to the success of any enterprise. To protect the integrity of enterprise-owned information, prevent corporate scandals, and ensure customer privacy, new laws and regulations have emerged governing a variety of enterprises. Some of today"s more prominent security mandates include:

• SOX ' The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 requires strict internal controls and independent auditing of financial information as a proactive defense against fraud.
• HIPAA ' The Health Information Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 requires tight controls over handling of and access to medical information to protect patient privacy.
• GLBA ' The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 requires financial institutions to create, document and continuously audit security procedures to protect the nonpublic personal information of their clients, including precautions to prevent unauthorized electronic access.
• FISMA ' The Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 is meant to bolster computer and network security within the federal government and affiliated parties (such as government contractors) by mandating yearly audits.
• Basel II ' The Capital Requirements Directive/Basel II Accord established an international standard that banking regulators can use when creating regulations about how much capital banks need to put aside to guard against the types of financial and operational risks banks face.
• UK Data Protection Act of 1998 ' The eight principles of the Data Protection Act state that all data must be processed fairly and lawfully; obtained and used only for specified and lawful purposes; adequate, relevant and not excessive; accurate, and where necessary, kept up to date; kept for no longer than necessary; processed in accordance with individuals rights as defined in the Act; kept secure; and transferred only to countries that offer adequate data protection.

 

In addition to these federal, state and international regulations, enterprises typically maintain a large, evolving body of internal policies designed to protect the company"s information resources, employees, customers and brand reputation.

Major Priorities for Information Security

Ernst & Young has identified five major priorities for information security where there is an ongoing need for continuous improvement. T hese are:

• Integrating information security with the organization: embedding information security into the mainstream of the business with increased visibility and resources.
• Extending the impact of compliance: shifting attitudes from compliance as a distraction to being an enabler, bringing advances in risk-based security for organizations.
• Managing the risk of third party relationships: recognizing the challenges, issues and actions needed to manage the risks with global suppliers and outsourced partners.
• Focusing on privacy and personal data protection: taking a proactive and comprehensive approach to mitigating the risks related to privacy and personal data protection.
• Designing and building information security: using externally imposed compliance deadlines and security incidents as a catalyst for proactive investments in stronger capabilities and defenses.

 

Ernst &Young "Compliance Pays Off in Information Security," as reported by Scoop Independent News

III. Applying IT Governance Frameworks to the Compliance Challenge

Many organizations faced with multiple compliance requirements are now adopting IT governance frameworks that can cover a large percentage of regulatory compliance mandates. Three of the most widely employed frameworks are:

• COBIT® 4.0 ' Published by the IT Governance Institute (ITGI) COBIT 4.0 emphasizes regulatory compliance. It helps organizations to increase the value attained from IT and enables alignment with business goals and objectives. COBIT offers the advantage of being very detail oriented, which makes it readily adoptable across all levels of the organization. It also makes use of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) as a way of assessing the status of security processes.
• ISO 17799:2005 (ISO 27001) ' This is an international standard for the management of IT security that organizes controls into ten major sections, each covering a different topic or area. These are: business continuity planning, system development and maintenance, physical and environmental security, compliance, personnel security, security organization, computer operations and management, asset control, and security policy.
• NIST 800-53 ' This publication from the National Institute of Standards and Technology is a collection of "Recommended Security Controls for Federal Information Systems." It describes security controls for use by organizations in protecting their information systems, and recommends that they be employed in conjunction with and as part of a well-defined information security program.

 

An added benefit of adopting control frameworks is the creation of repeatable processes for compliance and security processes. This has typically led to the ability to better cope with multiple regulatory compliance mandates and an overall reduction of compliance costs. However, the issue of cross-team processes and communication must still be addressed.

IV. Accountability and the Stakes of Noncompliance

Legitimate businesses really have no option but to adopt policies and technologies to ensure compliance with relevant regulations and policies, and to document both the compliance measures and the results for audit purposes. In this increasingly complicated regulatory environment, the relationship between a company"s IT department and the rest of the business is changing dramatically.

Failure to manage compliance with regulatory mandates and internal policies imposes serious legal and security risks to the company. Protecting customer data from loss, ensuring the integrity of financial data, and preventing leaks of intellectual property as well as private employee data have become top priorities. As top-level executives have come to recognize the stakes, they"re increasingly holding IT managers accountable for enforcing and documenting compliance with regard to electronic systems and networks. When it comes to evaluating the performance of the IT staff, compliance metrics and audit results are now as important as system uptime and performance statistics.

"Many organizations are spending more than they need to on IT-related compliance work, because they haven"t clearly defined the scope of what"s necessary and sufficient for disclosure&8230;.However, the organization also must consider how IT support for compliance activities can be provided on an enterprise-wide basis for all compliance needs, rather than just implementing "point" solutions for specific needs (such as Sarbanes-Oxley attestation)."

Gartner, Inc.

V. Divided Teams with Many Tools: The Problem of Ad Hoc Compliance Management

In a digital world, the obvious response is to automate as much of the compliance and documentation process as possible. Without automated solutions, the burdens of compliance threaten to overwhelm the organization with spiraling costs and risks.

But historically, the available automation tools have been rudimentary and immature at best, ranging from complex products targeted at specific areas of compliance or specific parts of the security team, to simple collections of spreadsheets. Often, generic configuration and risk management solutions are pressed into service to support highly individualized compliance functions" with a lot of manual labor or programming effort required to collate generic data into regulation- and policy-specific compliance data. This often leads to "results" that are inaccurate and hard to replicate/prove on a regular basis due to the manual processes used.

Adding to the problem of ineffective tools, compliance enforcement and documentation is a business process that is still relatively new. Different business units focus on different aspects of the total problem, using the limited tools at hand. For example, a typical enterprise may have three different IT teams assigned to compliance tasks, including:

A security and vulnerability management team is tasked with identifying vulnerabilities in applications, databases and the IT infrastructure before they can compromise enterprise, employee or customer security. This team asks, "Where are the vulnerabilities in our IT environment?"

An IT operations team, typically made up of teams of operating system and application administrators, is tasked with "fixing" various problem issues discovered on systems. This team asks, "What vulnerable or noncompliant systems need to be fixed?" It then undertakes the actual work of fixing them in order of priority.

An audit team is tasked with defining compliance standards, evaluating conformance to those standards, and documenting both compliance and exceptions for the benefit of external auditors and other stakeholders. This team asks, "Are we meeting regulatory standards and baselines, and are we complying with internal policies?"

As in the Hindu fable of the blind men and the elephant, these three teams look at the same large body of data, but their viewpoints are fragmentary and limited. One team has the elephant by the tail, another by the trunk, and the third by the ear. In fact, the situation is even more disjointed than the fable suggests, since the body of data itself is fragmented by the use of multiple, non-integrated data collection and reporting tools.

With no coherent, big-picture way of viewing compliance data across the organization"or across different regulatory requirements"compliance teams are increasingly caught in inefficient, ad hoc processes. Compliance tasks are often redundant between one regulatory sphere and the next, and across compliance teams. In addition, the use of point solutions that assist only one of these three IT teams in addressing overlapping security and compliance needs makes the problem of fragmentary data and redundant work even more burdensome.

What"s needed is a converged solution supporting the entire compliance process that combines policy management with configuration scanning based on defined policies and remediation, all with granular task-based access control. In the next section a more in-depth view of the roles of the IT teams and their responsibilities will be explored.

"Compliance is an all-encompassing set of activities that cross business and IT groups "everyone is affected in some way. The numbers show that technology is now playing an increasingly significant role in the integration of those compliance requirements into existing business processes."

John Hagerty AMR Research

VI. The Big Picture: The Scope of Compliance Activities and the IT Team

To map out the requirements of a successful compliance solution, the responsibilities of all three compliance-related teams must be taken into consideration. Let"s first take a look at traditional overlapping responsibilities of each. We can break down all compliance activities into a series of tasks that can be roughly grouped under the categories of definition, discovery, evaluation and remediation. Assigning these tasks to the three groups we"ve identified, the tasks map as follows:

Even though each team has unique responsibilities, there"s obviously a lot of overlapping responsibility within their respective roles. At the same time, there"s a lot of overlap in compliance requirements for different regulatory mandates and internal policies, which leads to unnecessary spending to deploy and manage one-off solutions for each individual area of compliance. These overlaps provide an opportunity to consolidate policy controls and compliance data"reusing policies, controls and compliance data whenever possible to accommodate the needs of each compliance team and the requirements of each regulatory mandate and each security policy.

For example, an organization"s password policies have relevance across SOX, HIPAA, GLBA, NIST and other external mandates, as well as to internal security processes. Likewise, controls over user access and permissions have relevance for SOX, GLBA, NIST and internal processes. Patch policy is relevant to SOX, NIST and internal IT management. And all of these policies and controls have relevance for the activities of the compliance audit, vulnerability management and IT operations teams.

VII. Requirements for a Converged Solution

How can an organization take advantage of these overlapping areas to centralize and simplify compliance management while saving time and money in the process? We"ve already identified the role of each IT team in the compliance process and some of the required solution elements to support each team"s role. To create convergence, solution elements should include:

A single, electronic library of policy and compliance standards and controls

As organizations develop best practices for regulatory and policy compliance, they need to reuse compliance policies and controls wherever possible, applying intelligent filtering and analysis to meet the requirements of each team and compliance task. That means implementing a library of policy and compliance information that spans operating systems, applications, and both external and internal compliance processes.

For example, many businesses have discrete strategies for controlling malware, limiting the deployment of peer-to-peer software, controlling the deployment of applications that could prove harmful to the IT environment, and other compliance and security needs. In a recent implementation, one enterprise was utilizing 57 different, paper-based standards for dealing with all the different operating systems and applications in use. A more efficient and effective compliance model would collect all these standards and controls in one electronic library, where they can be efficiently accessed, updated and shared by different compliance teams for different purposes.

Instead of building and maintaining compliance checks for each regulatory and internal business requirement, companies need to adopt a "build once, deploy many times" strategy. With a few variances, a single core group of compliance checks can provide support across most or all of an organization"s compliance obligations. For example, user password policies, user access privileges, account management and other types of checks can be designed to satisfy all internal and regulatory requirements, eliminating the burden of management redundancy and allowing compliance teams to focus their efforts on the few remaining unique compliance requirements.

Change control

Policy checks typically have a lifecycle, with the number of checks and the specific requirements of each changing over time as business needs change and new systems come online. To accommodate these lifecycles and support compliance documentation, the compliance system needs to include a change control mechanism that provides an audit trail including the date of any change, author of the change, and any required change approval.

Audit against an established IT gold standard

To ensure policy compliance, new systems can be checked both prior to deployment and continuously once the systems are operating in the production environment. To provide efficient support for both methods, IT can create a "gold standard" or baseline for a specific host configuration, testing all other hosts of that type against the gold standard. For businesses that regularly deploy servers from a test environment into a production environment, this approach allows for certification of the host configuration, ensuring that a compliance baseline has been met and reducing risk in the deployment phase.

Once hosts have been deployed in the production environment, the appropriate detective controls should be used to measure policy compliance on an ongoing basis. Determining compliance usually involves querying a data set that represents the configuration of the operating system and applications on one or more hosts, and comparing the query results to the expected results as documented for the relevant compliance policy. Here again, having an established gold standard can provide invaluable support. Policy-driven control testing, as defined by specific controls, can represent hundreds of very specific queries of host configuration data sets for thousands of hosts compared to the expected query results.

Exception control

Day-to-day operations may often require temporary or role-based exceptions to the blanket policy. For example, a company"s security policies may include a restriction against running an FTP service on any server. But certain employees in the enterprise, at certain times, may have a temporary need to use FTP. Such a policy exception and the ensuing workflow must be allowed and documented in a way that formally acknowledges the company"s acceptance of the risk involved in permitting the exception. This is especially important when compliance controls are audited by third parties"such as internal or external auditors"who may not otherwise understand the business reasons for deliberately violating the policy.

Consolidated management, reporting and issue tracking

In consolidated management, reporting and issue tracking, the main goals of a converged compliance and vulnerability management solution are achieved. Ideally, you have one system for the entire enterprise that allows you to:

• Manage multiple compliance requirements, including all relevant external regulations and internal security policies. The solution should provide a continuous, automated view of host configuration with data updated on every host scan.
• Generate reports that support each compliance team"s needs, including compliance metrics and audit results. All reports should draw upon one data set for all compliances, ensuring consistency and completeness.
• Issue and track service tickets to ensure that issues are promptly reported to and resolved by the appropriate asset owners. This capability should be a built-in feature of the solution in order to eliminate the time lag"or even the black hole"that often occurs when issues trickle down through the organization from IT to a department manager, to the responsible party.

VIII. Architecture for a Converged Solution

A converged solution needs to support all of the pieces of the compliance process, with the right tools all applied in the right order for the right teams. An illustration of the converged solution architecture and process flow is shown below.

"Through 2007, companies that choose one-off solutions for each regulatory challenge they face will spend 10 times more on IT solutions for compliance than their counterparts that take a sustainable programmatic approach. The pressure of meeting SOX deadlines may have led many CIOs to implement one-off projects and miss opportunities to secure long-term benefits for their businesses. This will, in some cases, mean more budget will be spent to advance these projects in 2008 and 2009."

Gartner, Inc. "Gartner Survey Shows Spending for Compliance and Corporate Governance to Account for 10 to 15 Percent of an Enterprise"s 2006 IT Budget"

VIIII. Why Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is best suited for Compliance

We have identified the problems associated with using compliance point solutions that address only one segment of the IT team"s needs, and that may be further limited by each team"s geographic location. All teams within IT need a unified compliance approach that supports the specific role of each team while supporting the segregation of duties between them. The benefits of the SaaS approach, which is the foundation of Qualys" award-winning vulnerability management and policy compliance system, include:

• A Trusted Third Party that yields reliable data. Because all host compliance data and policies are securely stored by QualysGuard® and not subject to manipulation, auditors trust the integrity and accuracy of the information and resulting QualysGuard reports.
• Deployment and Scalability is extremely important when diverse compliance teams are scattered across the globe. SaaS is best suited to support geographically dispersed teams that may be responsible for compliance for the entire enterprise or only one small part. Scheduled compliance scans can be run against specific parts of the enterprise at specific times, allowing for continuous scanning for compliance issues. SaaS removes scalability as a total cost of ownership (TCO) concern, and compliance becomes as ubiquitous as the web browser.
• Agent-less solutions speed deployment and cost less to manage over time. Remediating configuration compliance issues is not complicated by having to remediate problems with the software agents that collect compliance data. Hosts that have malfunctioning software agents cannot be considered in compliance reports.
• Subscription-based SaaS model allows the customer to control the compliance solution without the "sunk-costs" associated with purchasing, licensing and supporting software based products. The entire service is priced per host and there are no hidden costs. This is in stark contrast to solutions that comprise a management console, data collection agents, databases, add-on modules for compliance reporting and in some cases, a separate product that manages selective compliance policies. Simplified deployment, a reliable gold-standard of reporting, and overall lower TCO are primary benefits of the subscription-based SaaS approach.
• Role-based Access to data is critical to an organization made up of IT teams that all have some role to play in the compliance process. The roles played by all compliance teams"IT operations, security and vulnerability management, internal audit and policy management"need to be supported. Even an external audit firm could be granted a view of compliance reports to gauge compliance status over time and streamline the consulting engagement.

"Compliance is having demonstrable, repeatable security processes to keep the auditors happy."

Dave Bixler Siemens

X. Look to Qualys for Converged Compliance Leadership

Qualys understands the challenges organizations face as different teams and asset owners throughout the organization struggle to achieve and document compliance in an ever-changing regulatory and compliance landscape. That"s why Qualys approaches vulnerability and compliance management as a global issue that crosses your enterprise"s organizational boundaries"and that encompasses an ever-growing and changing web of overlapping requirements.

For a free QualysGuard evaluation or to learn more about Qualys" vulnerability management and policy compliance solutions, visit:
www.qualys.com.