In the ever-evolving landscape of compliance, the responsibilities of security compliance professionals have grown exponentially. Amidst the complexity of compliance frameworks and the constant barrage of cross-organization requests, the list of pain points your team faces goes on and on.
But what if there was a way to alleviate the massive burden of achieving, maintaining, and managing security compliance within your organization?
ASCERA reduces the pain of cyber compliance and assessments by allowing you to save significantly on labor, time, and cost through automating vital processes like evidence collection, reviewing compliance status for controls/objectives, calculating your organization’s SPRS score, and managing continuous data feeds.
Want to learn more about how ASCERA addresses the biggest security compliance pain points? Keep reading!
1. Evidence Collection
Security assessments require significant resources including weeks, or even months, of time and effort. For IT, InfoSec, or Compliance leaders, 50% of your time is sucked into an assessment with significant requests for evidence, interviews and scheduling, and depending on SMEs to gather evidence. Sys Admin and Security Engineers, however, are asked to pull data from security tools with significant amounts of unaccounted-for work and consequences if unable to provide acceptable evidence.
ASCERA automates 59% of this process while eliminating cross-organizational pull. Over half of the 110 NIST 800-171 Controls are technical controls. Which means there is, or needs to be, an implemented technology to support that control. Each of those technologies generates log data and configuration data that can be collected and analyzed. ASCERA collects this data in real-time, feeds it into a compliance rules engine, and generates a current state body of evidence—eliminating the need for you or your team to do it manually.
2. Ambiguity of Controls
If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that security control satisfaction is ambiguous. What exactly constitutes as compliant on a control-by-control basis? More importantly, what is an acceptable body of evidence to satisfy each control? Security compliance professionals are often left scrambling in attempts to answer these questions while working with the NIST 800-171 framework.
ASCERA removes the possibility of confusion with automated controls’ status reporting and monitoring. Paired with the solution’s automated evidence collection, ASCERA gives a near real-time, detailed report on your environment—including every control within the framework you’re adhering to, every requirement of satisfying that control, and how much (percentage) of each you’ve completed.
3. Obsolete Assessment Results
So, your organization finally got through an official C3PAO or DIBCAC compliance security assessment. Unfortunately, there’s typically little time to celebrate when your team now must deal with the results. What do any of them mean? As a static snapshot of the point in time your assessment took place, these results provide little to work with, especially when they can be subjective based on outdated approaches from individual assessors.
Your environment is dynamic, constantly generating system data. It’s also changing daily based on users and devices and movements throughout your security stack. ASCERA directly accounts for this by providing near real-time information about the current state of your environment. Instead of deciphering what needs to be changed in your environment from your assessment, ASCERA shows you exactly what security controls are satisfied, which are not, and what is left of each requirement.
4. Required Ongoing Security Monitoring
Many organizations are unaware that this is a requirement of NIST 800-171 and when they find out, it’s too late. As a security compliance professional, single-handedly managing Continuous Control Monitoring (CCM) across 320+ controls and sub-controls is difficult! On top of that, this requirement is vague leaving many to wonder if they’re doing it correctly or unsure of where to even begin.
ASCERA is an automation tool that seamlessly implements CCM into your environment. As a supplement to your GRC, ASCERA provides you real-time insight into the status of your control effectiveness and alerts your team if your controls are drifting out of compliance in addition to capabilities that allow security control owners. This approach shifts your compliance program into a proactive state, rather than reacting to inconsistent point-in-time assessments—all while satisfying NIST 800-171’s requirement of ongoing security monitoring.
Make Security Compliance Easier with ASCERA
You don’t get any points in life for doing things the hard way. More importantly, doing things the hard way leads to a greater chance of making errors, inducing stress, and overall inefficiency. As a security compliance professional, your job is already doing a lot at once, but with ASCERA, you can take quite a few things off your plate—while improving and streamlining processes across your compliance program!