The Urgency of Action: Staying Mission Aligned
Continuous STIG Compliance Keeps Systems Mission Aligned
One of today’s most sure-fire—and challenging—ways to protect our nation’s sensitive data is STIG compliance. Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) identify areas of critical technology that are vulnerable to attack so they can be hardened. In a time of increasingly sophisticated ransomware and other cyberattacks, compliance with mandated security measures like STIGs is vital to our nation’s security.
Achieving compliance is one thing. Maintaining it is another, however. Once a secure baseline is established, compliance tends to drift. Maybe you add a new user or a new API; in this instance your network is no longer the same network as it was when you originally reached compliance. One small change can cause a risk. Extend that out over time with multiple small changes and you could be vulnerable to attack.
The defense community speaks often about automation’s ability to quickly establish a secure baseline that’s aligned to industry requirements. Compliance automation solutions like SteelCloud’s ConfigOS can also work tirelessly in the background to also ensure your system doesn’t drift. If alignment with mission is key, staying aligned is just as vital.
Align with real-time awareness of your compliance posture.
Getting compliant is difficult but maintaining that compliance posture is even more difficult. ConfigOS DashView revolutionizes the way organizations monitor and maintain their compliance with near real-time awareness of your compliance posture with a Splunk-based DashView dashboard or your SIEM of choice. Now you can gain visibility into your organization’s infrastructure security and compliance posture by continuously evaluating and monitoring failed security controls.
With ConfigOS and DashView, leadership is aligned with your cybersecurity mission and how immaculately it’s run. In addition, your compliance efforts are aligned to government requirements and, with ConfigOS’s reporting, you can prove it to government inspectors.
Align with proven cybersecurity best practices.
With STIGs, aligning to government requirements also means aligning with other government agencies. It means creating a united front against enemy cyberattacks. So, while STIGS can challenge your timelines, manpower and ability to get new apps online, they are a critical best practice that creates a barrier between government agencies and those that wish to harm them.
Automation eliminates most of the challenges of STIG compliance and maintenance. It removes 90% of the effort and 70% of the time involved with achieving compliance, risk management and authority to operate. Agencies are required to STIG every app and tool; and they are present in every system and application stack across classified, unclassified, cloud, and tactical environments. Plus, it must be done each quarter when STIGs are updated. When you consider all that, the time savings automation can provide translate to weeks and months of mind-numbing effort.
Automating the compliance process not only saves time and effort, but it brings new tools online quicker and frees you to work on backlogs, Zero Trust and other critical needs. It also brings all your systems and applications and environments into alignment from a security standpoint, reflecting consistency and assurance across departments and agencies.
Align to your most critical mission.
We all know painfully well that you can STIG manually. But that era may be coming to an end. Between the increasing sophistication of attacks, the constantly evolving technology landscape, and a severe cyber workforce shortage, automation is a necessary strategy in your risk management and compliance efforts.
SteelCloud’s ConfigOS makes the hardening process easy. Align with a better way to comply. Schedule a ConfigOS demo today.
