Compliance is a “ticket to entry” for businesses today, and information security risk management (ISRM) makes sure organizations hang on to their ticket. In this blog, we’ll review how ISRM helps organizations not only get compliant but stay compliant.
And how Tripwire makes that process automatic.
Compliance is a Core Cost of Doing Business Today
Without adhering to industry-standard data privacy and cybersecurity compliance principles, a modern enterprise can hardly exist. Research shows that the average organization is subject to at least six compliance frameworks, and many are subject to many more – especially if they are doing business internationally. Compliance and information security risk management go hand in hand; in the top-performing 5% of businesses, a full 80% of business and risk leaders said they improved their approach to risk in order to step up their compliance posture in the past 12 months.
Considering the fact that most compliance standards are over 100 pages long (GDPR is 261 pages!), the amount of configuration required for an organization to adhere to just one is enormous. Reducing risk via proper configuration and compliance might be necessary, but as any governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) officer knows, it is anything but easy. And that is where information security risk management comes in.
What is Information Security Risk Management (ISRM)?
Information security risk management, or ISRM, is the process of finding and addressing security issues that pose a threat to your organization now or could present a risk in the future. This is accomplished through four basic steps:
- Identify risks | A proper information security risk management process starts by identifying all outstanding risks to your organization. This is a tall task, but it largely comes down to spotting vulnerabilities and finding any weaknesses or incongruities in configurations.
- Assess and prioritize risks | Next, each identified risk must be weighed and measured. This means assessing them for severity (what is the impact on the organization should this risk come to fruition?) and analyzing how likely they are to occur. Good ISRM software can do this automatically.
- Mitigate risks | How you deal with each risk depends on the risk itself. Critical (“severe”) risks you want to mitigate right away. Unimportant ones you can avoid (for now). Unavoidable ones that would take too many resources to address can be “passed off” to cyber insurers, for instance.
- Continuous monitoring and ongoing reporting | Now comes the hard part. Executing an information security risk assessment once is comprehensive enough, but to have an ISRM program that maintains compliance continually, ongoing monitoring needs to be put in place. Ideally, 24/7 monitoring of your organization’s risk profile and attack surface is ideal, and you’ll probably need automation for this.
Is ISRM Necessary for Compliance? Yes.
Certain regulatory standards require organizations to perform information security risk assessments to stay compliant. Compliance frameworks explicitly requiring information security risk analysis include:
With many more effectively requiring it, as organizations are mandated to perform risk assessments and take steps to reduce the attack surface by eliminating risks at scale.
The Challenges of Information Security Risk Management (ISRM)
Managing information security risk is difficult because configurations do not remain stagnant. If not monitored continuously, networks and systems are subject to configuration drift. This means that organizations that were once fully compliant can be less so, thanks to changes that occur in a network every day. Configuration drift can be caused by:
- Unrecorded changes to software and hardware
- Software updates that conflict with current compliant configurations
- Poor change management
- Human error
And more. Much of information security risk management entails tracking these changes, monitoring and identifying when un-compliant changes occur, and providing teams with the actionable data they need to bring systems back into compliance as efficiently as possible.
Tripwire: Putting ISRM On Autopilot
In life, there are very few things you can “set and forget,” but Tripwire’s integrity management solution just might be one of them.
Consider again the primary problem with monitoring information security risks; the fact that you need to monitor them means that at any moment, they are subject to change. This can happen for two reasons:
- New threats are introduced from a threat actor (either internal or external).
- Security configurations have changed/drifted without you knowing it, and your network is no longer secure.
Fortra’s Tripwire Enterprise is designed to combat both.
Handling Security Threats
When threat actors come, they often try the door handles before breaking through a window. In digital terms, this means they go straight for those unseen, unpatched, forgotten vulnerabilities nearly every company leaves behind. Factor in the software supply chain, and this number exponentiates.
With Fortra VM (formerly Tripwire IP360), teams can discover vulnerabilities hiding within their systems and get a prioritized list of the ones presenting the highest risk. Plus, powerful built-in reporting capabilities help meet compliance and regulatory standards.
Combatting Configuration Drift
Tripwire’s integrity management and cybersecurity solutions help reduce information security risk by combatting the second major threat: configuration drift. Aligning internal processes (like Windows configurations) across every workstation for every relevant agency is no small feat but doing it again every time a new service or system was introduced, or a new update rolled out, would be next to impossible.
Tripwire’s file integrity and change monitoring tool continually monitors your attack surface for changes, noting unauthorized alterations that could knock you out of compliance. Additionally, Tripwire Enterprise: Security Configuration Management (SCM) software provides the platform for you to find and act on that data in real time in a centralized location.
Getting Compliant and Staying Compliant
Information security risk management underpins an organization’s ability to meet compliance regulations. With Tripwire, ISRM doesn’t have to mean messy homegrown processes, pages of spreadsheets, or manual reminders to audit for drift.
Tripwire’s information security risk-managing solutions streamline the process, making automatic monitoring – and continuous compliance – a less overwhelming possibility. That way, organizations that take the time to meet compliance configurations can continue to meet them with minimal effort, year after year.
