What Is Security Compliance?
Security compliance management is assessing devices and networks to ensure they’re compliant with regulations and industry standards. It can be challenging for highly regulated industries and sectors, so there are steps you can take to simplify it.
What Is Cloud Compliance?
When a company is in the cloud, it should be concerned with how the cloud provider will help them stay compliant. This discussion should start from the beginning, not after the cloud security service has been established.
Business owners sometimes find themselves in the cloud whether they plan to. To avoid any complications, one of the core tenets of staying with the cloud is that there should be a straightforward process of entering and exiting cloud services with a self-service interface.
Businesses spend their time and money using the cloud, but they have no idea what is really happening. There are many employees in the company that uses their corporate credit card to make purchases without realizing that they are breaking regulations.
Cloud Security and Compliance Challenges
Security and compliance go hand-in-hand. Security is fairly necessary when discussing compliance requirements, as they often retain security as a primary concern. There are, however, specific security challenges that can inhibit a company’s transparency, enough so that encryption is necessary even using the cloud:
Operational Consistency
In order to be efficient, you need to regulate your operations. Ensuring that basic processes are standardized makes it easier to manufacture products or services. Similarly, cloud-based operations (such as retailing) require standardization as on-premise networks to maintain compliance and security.
Advanced Threats
Data cyber threats are relentless and never-ending, with attackers using increasingly sophisticated means to get your company’s information. Less sophisticated attackers may be looking for a quick score, while others have political and financial gains in mind, attempting to take over your systems or exploit them somehow. It has become easier to attack organizations because of the increased use of mobile workforces by attaching insecure networks to your sphere of control. Recent research shows that ransomware is one of the most common attack vectors, which is now worth a billion-dollar industry for those who use it.
Information Visibility
Historically, data was easy to find in the data center because that was the primary place it lived. However, data is more dispersed than ever as corporations now use mobile devices and cloud-based applications. In addition, it’s more challenging to find all your information because there are global regulations about its location.
How to Ensure Security and Maintain Compliance
Most organizations have focused on achieving compliance and not security. They believe that if they’ve been compliant, then they’re secure. Compliance does not assure security, however. If the organization’s efforts are focused solely on compliance, then holes can be missed in the information security program.
The role of compliance is to demonstrate that an organization meets standards. If you’re only looking at compliance, there’s a chance an organization might miss some aspects of information security.
However, if the focus of your company is on security, then external compliance would be simple because you’re ahead of the game. Here are four things your company can do to uphold security:
Secure Software Development
Security development is imperative to any information security program. However, many industry standards don’t provide sufficient precisions on doing this. Utilizing a software development life cycle (SDLC) in your security process ensures security compliance and effectiveness.
Encryption and Key Management
Make sure any data you are encrypting is necessary for your organization. If not, it needs to be blocked and destroyed. A key management program should include generating vital keys and ensuring they are securely distributed. The keys need to be replaced when they weaken or are compromised to preserve compliance with frameworks.
Hardening and System Patching
To avoid security vulnerabilities, good patch management will require an organization to implement all of these components. Firstly, you need a policy that covers how updates are deployed. Secondly, the frequency and timing for deploying a critical patch should be stated in this policy. You also need testing requirements and methods outlined, as well as staff training. And lastly, you need to identify any tools needed for assessing patches or vulnerabilities and ensure that your employees are sufficiently trained with them.
Firewall and Router Management
Organizations should use security breaches to warn that they need to focus on maintaining a safe environment. Firewall and router management are key aspects of that maintenance. When thinking about best practices for firewall and router management, it is essential to think about the physical devices, operating system security, and traffic rules.
To prevent being in the headline as a victim of powerful attack, implementing these four security practices can help. Checking into security rather than focusing on compliance will ensure your company has thorough protection against hackers. Contact us today to talk more about what you need to do to heighten security.
Prepping for Todays Security Challenges
There are new challenges to the growth of information technology that must be met for them to succeed. As a result, there is a push for data regulation and IT compliance frameworks to ensure data can be stored securely or shared correctly. These frameworks come with various guidelines to ensure companies are compliant and have a choice in what they need from their system.
To be compliant with security, be sure to secure your data, prevent damage, protect it, and detect theft. Technical frameworks are the standard methods of achieving Compliance that cybersecurity teams typically use.
A company needs to understand that Compliance is not the same as security. Security is a big part of Compliance, but it isn’t limited to just security measures. A company should have the necessary security and compliance measures in place before data within the company can be adequately protected.
How vTech Comes Into the Picture
Within minutes, vTech can help you protect against the most critical risks by providing insights into vulnerability, malware, and more. With vTech, you can take action on important information that you are blind to by identifying vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations.
vTech provides you with a new, data-driven approach to cloud security that gives you insights into previously hidden risks. The technology collects data directly from your cloud configuration, and the workload’s runtime block storage out-of-band. As a result, vTech lets you act on critical risks within minutes.
vTech leverages the full context of your entire AWS, Azure, and Google. It provides a comprehensive, single view of your real cloud estate. Combining all the relevant cloud assets, software, connectivity, and trust relationships into one graph gives you a unified view of the risk posed by any underlying security issue. This helps security teams prioritize and focus on these issues most critical to the business.
With vTech ‘s query language, you can find specific information using parsed words. This enables one to optimize the workplace and improve efficiency by assigning issues to the appropriate people.
What Is vTech’s Cloud Security?
vTech’s Cloud Security safeguards all of your cloud assets at once with its deep workload security and compliance system for AWS, Azure, and the various GCPs. This module can detect vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, and high-risk data such as PII without any operational costs or experiential upsets.
vTech is best for large enterprises and businesses that are “born in the cloud” with a strong presence in the software, ad tech, internet, and media industries.
Conclusion
At vTech, security is our top priority. Security is deeply embedded in our culture and processes, which means it permeates everything we do. What does this mean for you?
As a vTech customer, you benefit from a data center and network architecture built to meet the world’s requirements of the most security-sensitive organizations. You also get advanced security services designed by engineers with deep insight into global security trends, like continuous monitoring and being able to automate tasks to reduce risk.
