The year 2024 is set to bring forth significant challenges in upholding regulatory compliance due to the rapid changes in regulations. While comprehending assets has always been integral to various compliance regulations, there is a growing emphasis on continuous monitoring in regulatory compliance, irrespective of industry-specific compliance frameworks.
Automation stands out as the pivotal evolution that will facilitate continuous monitoring, emerging as a crucial element. This enables organizations to assertively affirm their complete compliance with the specific regulations governing them. Well-known regulations such as NIST, ISO27001, PCI, HIPAA, and SOX now mandate continuous monitoring of business infrastructure as imperative for maintaining regulatory compliance. The avoidance of addressing assets and neglecting continuous monitoring is becoming increasingly difficult to overlook.
Why have asset visibility and continuous monitoring become vital to regulatory compliance?
Rising Cyber security Threats:
The threat landscape has become more sophisticated, with an increase in cyber attacks, data breaches and other malicious activities. Asset management and continuous monitoring help organisations detect and respond to these threats promptly, minimising the impact on sensitive data and critical systems and propelling their operational efficiency.
The Need for More Dynamic IT Environments:
Traditional, static point-in-time approaches to cyber security are no longer sufficient in today’s businesses. Assets within an organisation’s infrastructure constantly change, with new devices, software and configurations being introduced regularly. Old, outdated assets become forgotten about if they are not in use leaving an open gateway for cyber criminals to penetrate your business. Continuous monitoring ensures that security controls adapt to these changes, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities going unnoticed.
Data Protection and Privacy Concerns:
Emphasis is now heavily on data protection and privacy and regulatory frameworks like GDPR and others are now requiring organisations to have a clear understanding of where sensitive data is stored and how it is being processed.
Proactive Risk Management:
Proactivity in risk management is a must. Vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and threats need to be identified in real time in order to prevent the likelihood of a security breach, so managing assets and monitoring your environment continuously is imperative in today’s risk landscape.
Globalisation and Interconnected Systems:
As organisations become more interconnected globally the impact of cyber security incidents can have far-reaching consequences. Not only that, the likelihood of a security breach and the increase of risk to an organisation are more evident as we work far more interconnected than ever.
What benefits are delivered to an organisation that focuses on understanding their assets and continually monitoring their business infrastructure?
At its core regulatory compliance aims to ensure that organisations steer their focus on protecting sensitive information and maintain the integrity of their entire business infrastructure. So understanding and having visibility of all assets and continuously monitoring them allows organisations to identify potential risks, what assets are affected by those risks and for teams to be proactive in their risk management.
Regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA require businesses to protect data. If organisations have assurance that they have complete asset visibility and can, with transparency, track the flow of data and where all sensitive data is, then they can state against their framework that they are implementing appropriate security measures to safeguard that data.
Continually monitoring your entire business infrastructure also means that you become proactive in your security posture management and can detect and respond to security threats in real time. Monitoring assets means you will identify any unusual activities, vulnerabilities and signs of a security breach almost instantaneously, resulting in prompt responses and a presentation on regulatory violations.
Asset visibility and continuous monitoring also provides customisable reporting, audit trails and evidence of adherence to standards – all crucial components to clearly stating and proving regulatory compliance. Ultimately this provides a dynamic IT – in fact dynamic business – environment that can be proactive and react to the evolving business.
Incorporating asset management and continuous monitoring aligns with recognised cyber security best practices. Regulatory frameworks often draw from industry standards such as ISO 27001, NIST Cyber security Framework and others, which emphasise the importance of these practices in maintaining a resilient and secure infrastructure. And this is a focus that will only grow as cyber criminals themselves utilise AI to be proactive themselves in their cyber-attacks.
In conclusion, embracing a more dynamic proactive approach to your security and risk strategy is being insisted upon by regulatory compliance enforcers but this sharpens the focus for businesses to utilise technology that can automate your processes, provide the asset visibility you need and continuously monitor your infrastructure.
Find out how CCM can support your regulatory compliance why not take a look at our platform here. Or perhaps you have a particular compliance regulation you need to comply to, so why not take a look at some of our recent blogs:
SOX Compliance read our blog here.
SOC 2 Compliance read our blog here.
NIST Compliance read our blog here.
DORA Compliance read our blog here.
ISO 27001 Compliance read our blog here.