This is part 4 of a 4-part series addressing compliance myths and what you need to know about uniting compliance and security in a hybrid environment. Read myth #3 here.

The levels of manual effort put in by security teams involved in reducing risk and completing compliance audits are compounded by the lack of real-time visibility of what is truly going on in their networks. With little to no visibility into their network, they fail to discover hidden threats that could lead to the next data breach or uncover compliance failures.

Many organizations have adopted a passive approach to compliance. They collect data in many formats and structures, stitch it together so they can validate that network activity conforms to rules and policies, add it to a database, and wait for alerts. To get answers from the ocean of data, security and compliance staff must become de facto data scientists.

This passive approach is putting your business at risk. You’re wasting time, burning out your security and compliance teams, leaving your environment open to risk, and exposing yourself to potential regulatory fines. By switching to a proactive approach based on comprehensive visibility, you can conduct assessments in moments and stay in compliance at all times.

The Infinite Cycle of Network Security Compliance

If your organization is like most, you lack the personnel and time to assess network activity in the context of compliance standards. When a new compliance standard is due, you’re still working on the data stitching process so you don’t know if you’ve achieved compliance or not. And no matter how fast you stitch data, you’ll never be done.

This cycle can feel like an exercise in futility, since the standards don’t genuinely prevent data compromises anyway. In the meantime, while a good chunk of your resources are tasked with testing and rolling out standards, the rest of the team is implementing even more permutations in your network and creating more data that will need to be stitched together.

With legislative and regulatory changes coming so rapidly, your network security and compliance teams are desperate for a better way. You need data that is ready to work with, and you need real-time visibility across the entire network.

Network Security Compliance on Demand

An assessment is a check of controls to determine if the current configuration passes or fails. Assessments allow you to proactively monitor device status instead of running an audit on each device or device group.

enables you to assign one or more assessments to a device group. Then monitors the status of assigned devices against the assessment. When a change happens, an email alert can be sent to the proper system or person for further action.

This frees up compliance and security personnel to focus on moving the business forward rather than digging into slow manual processes that yield error-ridden results. Compliance reports are available out of the box, including PCI  and NERC, as well as security best practices. Continuous compliance takes just seconds and alerts you when you start to drift. Only FireMon can offer continuous compliance because it is the only solution with real-time monitoring, traffic flow analysis, and custom controls to give you a 360-view of the entire network.

No More Ghosts in the Machines

The issue on the table for businesses is that they can’t protect or assess compliance for devices they can’t see. FireMon Lumeta identifies exactly what comprises the network, including any connections to external networks.

Lumeta maps every network connection, host, and active IP on the network. Organizations can validate policies, analyze the connectivity between networks and assets, uncover risk patterns and policy weaknesses, and proactively secure critical assets.

Never stitch data together again. With Lumeta, you can:

• Maintain continuous compliance with industry standards
• Optimize vulnerability management and incident response
• Eliminate audit surprises
• Gain fact-based compliance reporting
• Show protective measures are in place around sensitive customer & personnel data
• Provide continuous monitoring
• Automate audit reporting on network infrastructure

With Global Visibility, Continuous Compliance is a Reality

It is natural to assume, “Well, I guess fast assessments and comprehensive visibility just can’t be done.” And if we still had to rely on manual processes, they couldn’t. Now, however, you can. With automated processes, you can shorten the time to assess compliance standards and the outcomes produced by policies and rules.

The lesson learned from this myth is that global visibility has become achievable with the evolution of automation. Real-time and continuous, automated visibility across your entire network reduces your attack surface, eliminates data leaks, and ensures continuous compliance.