7 Challenges that Stand in the Way of Your Compliance Efforts

Compliance is very important to any organization. Organizations have many standards to choose from including PCI, CIS, NIST and so on. Oftentimes, there are also multiple regulations that are applicable in any country. So, organizations need to commit some time and resources in order to apply security standards and achieve compliance.

Even so, organizations encounter challenges when it comes to maintaining their compliance with security controls for their workflows, processes and policies. This begs the question: what challenges do organizations confront in their compliance efforts? Let’s explore them one by one.

Multiple Compliance Obligations

First, organizations have multiple compliance obligations. Like I said before, they might have to comply with a variety of different regulation standards. There’s the need to maintain compliance with all of these regulations. That is a challenge. Sometimes, organization’s policies conflict with compliance frameworks. Other times, different regulations don’t agree with one another. Even if there is no program, organizations need to be careful to fine tune any compliance standards in a way that complements their business needs and workflows. They need to do so in a way where all of their compliance efforts get along and don’t run into each other.

Multi-Country Presence

Second, some organizations don’t exist within the bounds of one country only. They might have branches in different countries. This is a challenge for any organization, as that entity needs to comply with the different regulations of all the countries in which it operates. Some regulations might be tougher than others, and some standards might not always complement each other.

The Pandemic

Third, there’s the pandemic situation. Some regulators have released updates specifically in response to COVID-19. As an example, Saudi Arabia’s National Cybersecurity Authority (NCA) released a regulation in response to a virus that requires organizations to have minimum guidelines in place. These new updates could make it more difficult (and more costly) for organizations to maintain compliance as new standards come out.

Legacy Systems

Fourth, many organizations are grappling with the challenges posed by legacy systems. Many of our customers still have legacy systems. They still have old versions of operating systems, hardware and so on. They’re still in the process of upgrading all of the servers. When you think about these legacy systems, you also need to think about compliance. You can’t just leave these systems unprotected when you’re carrying out your compliance work with all of your other systems. You need a solution that can work on these legacy systems.

Centralized Reporting

Fifth, organizations might struggle with centralized reporting. There are some organizations that operate in multiple countries, and there are even more organizations whose workstations have lots of different operating systems like Windows, Linux, etc. You need to get information from all of your systems regardless of what OS they’re running so that they can figure out what’s missing in their compliance efforts and move ahead with what they need to do. They might have compliance tools that work for only one type of device, or they might have cross-platform solutions that work for a limited number of devices. That’s a problem, as organizations then don’t have full visibility into their environments. Organizations need that centralized view in order to see what needs to be implemented throughout their infrastructure.

A Lack of Resources

Sixth, some organizations suffer from a lack of resources. Some organizations don’t have sufficient financial assets, whereas others don’t have enough human resources. With the realization that they need to maintain compliance, organizations need to buy some tools to help them to get information or to maintain the compliance they need to satisfy the auditor. They need to pay for those tools, and sometimes, finding the financial resources to do so can prove challenging. It’s a similar issue when it comes to human resources. Organizations need to get very talented people to help them maintain their compliance and support their policies. But that’s difficult given the ongoing cybersecurity skills gap.

Time

Finally, organizations need to keep time as a factor in their equation. They need to think about how they can find the time to maintain their compliance efforts. Depending on the tools they have and the reports they’re capable of generating, maybe they’ll invest in a centralized reporting to minimize the time needed. All of this is relevant given the inevitability of a quarterly audit. Organizations need to get all of these policies set, and they need the time to do it.

Where Tripwire Comes In

Tripwire’s compliance solutions can help organizations to discover and profile all of their assets on their network. These tools can also help organizations to reduce their audit readiness costs by up to 40%, all while using agentless monitoring across their environments.

Here’s some other information about Tripwire’s tools:

• Tripwire can help organization to minimize the challenges discussed above. Its solutions provide customers with a centralized console across all platforms (Windows, Linux AIX, etc.) This means that the customer doesn’t need to purchase separate tools for each OS. It also enables organizations to install the Tripwire console orchestrator for the purpose of creating a presence in multiple countries.
• Tripwire can organizations address a lack of internal resources by helping to guide IT operations on how to fix gaps that cause misconfigurations.
• Speaking of misconfigurations, Tripwire’s File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) capabilities can help organizations to minimize the risks associated with changing configurations during the pandemic. These capabilities work by showing what changed, why this happened and how organizations can roll back if there is a misconfiguration.
• Finally, Tripwire has a large list of supported platforms that can help organizations with legacy systems to monitor their environments.

Want to learn more about Tripwire can help your organization meet its compliance obligations? If so, click here.

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Source:TripWire – Ehab Nour