Compliance is an essential aspect of every organization, and in business terms, it entails ensuring that organizations of all sizes, and their personnel, comply with national and international regulations, such as GDPR, HIPAA, and SOX. When guaranteeing compliance, many firms frequently overlook security.
Gary Hibberd states that compliance with laws or regulations is only the starting point for cybersecurity. "Complying with these requirements is therefore relatively easy, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you are more secure." But, if you begin with security in mind, you will frequently fulfill compliance requirements, and also account for any tightening of rules.
Regarding the objectives of both security and compliance, only one term suffices: risk. Risk management is the driving force behind compliance and security. This shared objective should motivate a collaborative effort to attain it. Both functions create, implement, and enforce protective controls for an organization. Having so much in common, these two would be natural allies, and this is frequently the case.
What are the security risks businesses face?
Companies offering public facing services, like retailers and insurers for example, are hosting web portals for their customers to access data, buy goods, and process credit card payments. These portals retrieve data from databases where all customer information is stored. These servers hold a large amount of critical and personal data.
Protecting this data is not only a compliance requirement, but increasingly, a risk management necessity. The risk is that an unauthorized person, whether a malicious insider or an external attacker, could gain access to this environment and manipulate or compromise this data or take down the portal. These bad actors could also scrape credit card information or exfiltrate customer data.
This is a big security risk as well as a business concern. Compromise of sensitive data entails both a reputational damage and a monetary one, ultimately harming business operations. One need not look far to see that data breaches continue to be a problem for businesses. You can probably name 5 breaches in the last year that personally affected you. It is evident, therefore, that protecting data is not only a compliance requirement but also a pressing business need.
How FIM can help you strengthen your security
File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) solutions are perfect for maintaining compliance, but they are also ideal for enhancing the security posture and incident response of these public facing companies.
FIM can monitor apps and web portals in real time to make sure that nobody is accessing the data without authorization. Businesses can set up monitoring of critical files, application installs, and customer database servers. The IT teams can then monitor for specific forensic information so that if something happens, they can have quick access to information about what changed and can respond quicker with more appropriate measures.
They can also set up alerts to provide early warning if something changes. Early warning emails or other notifications can help security teams to promptly react to security events and minimize the potential impact to the company’s reputation, productivity and revenue.
An additional benefit of deploying FIM for security is that businesses can expedite incident response and recovery in the event of a security event. Real time monitoring of system integrity means that the organization can react swiftly to rectify the situation back to intended state, limiting operational downtime. Various reports, such as the IBM Cost of Data Breach, indicate that the cost of a security event is proportional to the time an organization requires to detect and respond to an event. It also shows that misconfiguration is the 3rd most common cause of breaches—surpassed only by compromised credentials and phishing. Having the data required to understand what has changed and the nature of the modification is a great step toward enhancing business continuity and reduction of risk.
Secure your business with Tripwire FIM
The Tripwire Enterprise File Integrity Monitoring solution can help you not only be compliant with industry specific and national laws and regulations, but also safeguard your business. The solution benefits your security teams by providing a great level of detail about what has changed. Besides informing your organization which file has changed, it goes deeper into reporting by notifying what has changed within the file or any additional metadata about it.
If you want to discover any further use cases of Tripwire FIM solution download this handy guide.
5 Things Your FIM Solution Should Be Doing for You
Discover the pivotal role of File Integrity Monitoring in maintaining system security and compliance with major standards. Tripwire Enterprise stands out as an advanced solution, offering real-time detection and detailed context for system changes, making it a superior choice for robust cybersecurity.
