If you want to move at cloud speed, automate.
As Charles Dickens notes in the opening of his classic novel A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times and the worst of times.” We live in an age of wisdom and innovation regarding cybersecurity. Yet, today’s organizations are also experiencing unprecedented challenges in maintaining security.
Cybersecurity compliance is a daunting challenge. The need for modernization has never been greater. And in the midst of all this, cybersecurity teams and developers are asked to keep pace while facing a depleted, experienced workforce. The only way to fulfill that mission is automation. Even in the worst of times, it is a best-of-times solution you can rely upon to protect your systems and data.
“In an instant, the American people saw how cybercrime—now the most common crime in America—could jeopardize the integrity of critical infrastructure, the American economy, and our national security.” — Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), on last year’s Colonial Pipeline cyberattack, the impetus for the Better Cybercrime Metrics Act
As organizations rely more on moving to the “new frontier” of the cloud, they are also rethinking risk management. Software vendors need to prepare for more stringent governmental oversight of the software supply chain from coding through delivery and installation. And government agencies need to harden systems while speeding ATOs so that the most secure tools are always online for them.
Along with a move to a new environment, there needs to be a re-envisioning of what to do with new capabilities, tools, and solutions. According to Netskope’s Cloud and Threat Report, organizations with 500-2,000 employees use 690 specific cloud applications per month. This number doesn’t mean that the average organization also includes at least one device per employee, network devices, Internet of Things devices like printers, and on-premises applications.
For federal implementations, that means months upon months of lumbering STIG (Security Technical Implementation Guide) and CIS (Center for Information Security) compliance work. The only way to stay agile and aware enough to thwart attacks is to automate cybersecurity compliance. Forbes notes in their migration guide, “Automation becomes a must-have when there are hundreds of components that you need to migrate and even more performance tests to run to make sure everything works as intended.”
Automation makes the heart of security grow stronger.
In the federal government, robust cybersecurity mitigation strategies are vital to evolving the federal government’s cyber resilience. In addition, recent security directives underscore the need for increased information sharing and stronger public-private partnerships to leverage a range of strengths to combat ongoing cyber threats.
Government organizations and system integrators utilize SteelCloud’s ConfigOS for cloud compliance and applications because it allows them to perform IA functions at “cloud speed.” ConfigOS is lightweight, easy to install, and simple to support. In addition, ConfigOS is easy to license and is an excellent solution for two dozen, two hundred, or two thousand endpoints in the cloud or on-prem. Save time, effort, and costs as you:
- Detect Risks – Scan your entire environment in less than 60 minutes for visibility into your security posture.
- Prioritize Remediation – ComfigOS automates remediation, then lets you set remediation activities based on control criticality and impact on your environment.
- Document Compliance – Create a single source of documentation for waivers/exceptions to prove governance and reduce audit costs.
Once you’re secure, staying secure is easy.
Once you’re in compliance, you need to stay there. The sensitive nature of government data underscores the continual need to protect critical networks and systems. So again, CISA’s CDM Program plays a key role. Continuous diagnostics and monitoring (CDM) means once you’ve established a secure baseline, you monitor, diagnose and remediate the system 24/7 in perpetuity to keep it from drifting out of compliance.
ConfigOS is SteelCloud’s patented compliance software suite that allows anyone to quickly establish a securely perfect and fully compliant environment, from RMF and NIST SP 800-171 to STIG and CIS. It is a complete solution for auditing, scanning, enterprise-wide remediation, compliance reporting, and CDM. And it does the work of countless IA specialists without complaint.
Automation accelerates migration, so it moves at cloud speed.
Leveraging cloud computing offers increased scalability, agility, and modernization to the mix. And zero trust increases system vigilance. But only automation can deliver that secure baseline—and keep it that way—without requiring an army of specialists to make it happen. Automation is the secret sauce that makes effective cybersecurity happen with the pace at which our cyber-adversaries are progressing.
Automation can deliver reliable, repeatable results across multiple environments. It reduces human error and frees up staff time to focus on cloud migration’s higher-value, more strategic aspects. Furthermore, automation helps your business empower DevOps, artificial intelligence, real-time processing, and more.
Moving at cloud speed means effectively minimizing as many manual processes as possible. Automation makes that happen in both the best and worst of times. If you are moving to the cloud and want to do so quickly and securely, give us a call, and we’ll walk you through it.
