10 Reasons to Automate CIS Benchmarks in Higher Education

10 Reasons to Automate CIS Benchmarks in Higher Education

In a perfect world, you’d be able to afford a mature cybersecurity program. You’d confidently laugh off the 2300 attacks on the education sector each week. You’d brush off the fact that 74% of ransomware attacks on colleges are successful. And all those people talking Higher Ed being the most vulnerable to attack? Well, they can just tell it to the hand.

But you don’t live in a perfect world. You live in a world that’s challenged by decentralized legacy systems. A world with big hurdles to clear, from resource shortages to cultural resistance to change. A world where you’re not even sure what to do or where to start. So what do you do and where do you start?

CIS Benchmarks provide a cybersecurity roadmap for Higher Ed. 

CIS Benchmarks have emerged as the front runner approach for Higher Ed. They provide a roadmap filled with the best practices of what and how to secure your endpoints against phishing, ransomware, data breaches, denial of service attacks, online course invasions and more. Better yet, they are already being successfully implemented on many campuses.

But the best benefit of CIS Benchmarks is that they can be automated. CIS Benchmarks map to NIST and other standards that have been used for decades to protect our nation’s most sensitive data. While those approaches are more comprehensive, CIS Benchmarks provides the right sized approach for Higher Ed of all the proven approaches out there.

How CIS Benchmarks automation saves you from hackers, wasted effort, budget headaches, unexpected costs and public relations nightmares.

Here are 10 ways using CIS Benchmarks + Automation can change the dynamic between your school and global hackers looking for a $3.65M payout, the average price schools pay when research, student data and system availability are held for ransom:

1. Save time. Once implemented, automation can secure thousands of endpoints in an hour, rather than the months and years it takes to do it by hand.
2. Reduce effort. Automating CIS Benchmarks eliminates 90% of the effort of implementing controls manually.
3. Save money. With automation, you won’t need to hire consultants or additional staff to do the tedious work of scanning and remediation.
4. Continuously monitor and remediate. Automation software does all the work of scanning your systems and remediating issues each time you install an application update, add a new user or any other daily task that can move your system out of compliance.
5. Achieve 100% accuracy. Humans make mistakes. Software does exactly what it is told 24/7 without exception.
6. Preserve your reputation. The cost of a research or student data breach includes the loss of trust, enrollment, endowments and reputation that comes from being “outsmarted” by hackers.
7. Maintain current culture. Bringing in new teams to “do the work we are not capable of doing alone” is disruptive on many levels and it changes the dynamic of your team. With automation, you can implement CIS Benchmarks with the team you already have.
8. Reduce headache and overwhelm. You haven’t truly died the “Death of 1000 Paper Cuts” until you spend years repeating the boring, repetitive task of fixing applications that have just broken because you hardened a vulnerability. There’s a reason the people who do this work are paid handsomely.
9. Break cycles of vulnerability and non-compliance. With 2300 attacks on Higher Ed each week, it’s only a matter of time before every newscaster in the nation is talking about your school. Make today the last day you sweat bullets over these kinds of grim statistics.
10. Make cybersecurity maturity feasible. Because you think you can’t afford a steel vault, you make do with a brick box and a prayer. But if you use automation, you cut at least 70% of the costs of implementing CIS Benchmarks manually. It may be the most affordable way to mature your cybersecurity program to world-class status.

Automate CIS Benchmarks with the leader in CIS Benchmarks automation.

SteelCloud’s ConfigOS is not just a leading solution for CIS Benchmarks automation, it’s on the tip of the tongue of CIS leaders. We are a trusted CIS certified vendor. And our software has been proven across multiple industries, including education.

What feels like a risk at this stage of your transformation isn’t really a risk at all. Let us show you what automation can do. In just one week of testing, one college leader brought one of his test environments from 14% to 95% compliance using the staff he already had. Schedule a free demo and find out how he did it.