Which of the following are the essential elements required for continuous monitoring?

Mark Kerrison
CEO
NNT - New Net Technologies

The traditional approach to security is desperately flawed. NNT’s SecureOps strategy is a progressive way to deal with solving the problem of cybersecurity by combining the essential prescribed security controls recommended by frameworks such as NIST and the Center for Internet Security (CIS) with advanced threat prevention and detection, closed-loop intelligent change control and continuous compliance monitoring technology.

Good security starts with a great IT Operational function. If your IT infrastructure is a mess, you will never be able to keep it properly secure. By combining best practices for security with best practices in IT service management, your organization is able to leverage invaluable data from both sides, which will provide a unique vantage point when it comes to protecting your infrastructure and spotting potentially malicious events in real-time. All with the added benefit of a huge reduction in alert noise.

Security and IT Operations working hand in hand - forming the ideal security foundation to stop security breaches and incidents as we know them today.

Why Consider NNT SecureOps?

Leveraging our SecureOps strategy allows enterprises to save valuable time and already limited resources while continuously defending against the threat of cyberattacks. Adopting this unique strategy will enable to you -

• Automate Regulatory Compliance – significantly reduce audit workload and automate workflows to achieve and maintain continuous compliance, with the ability to produce compliance reports in minutes.
• Cut Unnecessary Spending – consolidate unnecessary security tools to reduce frivolous spending, resulting in increased operational efficiency and reduction in manual tasks.
• Continuously Monitor System Integrity in Real-Time - provide real-time detection and reduce the time it takes to detect threats and suspicious changes.
• Understand Your Security Posture - Maintain the security and integrity of your entire infrastructure by scanning all systems to uncover security risks and how to remediate.
• Minimize Change Noise - automatically validate changes as they’re detected using a combination of intelligent analysis, integration with ITSM systems and the world’s largest authoritative file whitelist.

Security Approach - Security Through System Integrity

Security Through System Integrity starts by ensuring that the essential prescribed controls recommended by frameworks such as NIST and the CIS, are properly implemented in order to establish a solid security foundation. These controls have been proven to prevent up to 95% of pervasive and dangerous cyber attacks and include best practices such as maintaining a defined inventory of authorized systems, software and configurations, best practice policy for the hardened configuration of systems, real-time vulnerability monitoring and secure policy controls. [Download this CIS Controls solution brief to learn more]

Once these controls are operational, NNT leverages intelligent change control technology to track and analyze changes made to the integrity of your systems by using self-learning, whitelisting technology and threat intelligence. This technology helps significantly reduce change noise, allowing organizations to improve their ability to spot potentially malicious activity in real-time.

With the recommended security controls in place and intelligent change control implemented, NNT uses dynamic baselining to ensure that your systems align to the most up-to-date, secure and compliant state at all times.

ITSM Approach - Closed-Loop Intelligent Change Control

The ITSM approach focuses on creating a closed-loop environment to map ‘expected’ changes with those occurring within your production environment. NNT has integrated the award-winning Change Tracker Gen7 R2 solution with all leading service management solutions to enable a closed-loop environment. Through these integrations, approved and authorized changes issued by ITSM tools can be validated by Change Tracker, including a full audit trail of what actually changed, reconciled with the change request(s).

By leveraging this closed-loop intelligent change control technology, recurring change patterns can be captured and identified as either harmless or potentially dangerous, separating pre-approved changes from unexpected and unwanted changes. Any identified changes that are not planned or map to an authorized work order are suspect to investigation and/or remediation.

Compliance Approach - Continuous Compliance and Assurance

Continuous Compliance & Assurance is a natural by-product of executing a good SecureOps strategy - whatever the standards, regulations or policies. This process of proactive risk management helps deliver predictable, transparent and control and cost-effective results to address cybersecurity goals all while decreasing day-to-day responsibilities and overhead.

Predefined policies can be applied in a matter of seconds in order to determine if your systems are within compliance or not. With the ability to automate the compliance validation process, NNT provides descriptive details on how exactly to verify if systems drift away from a compliant state. Organization’s are able to discover, validate, notify and attest to system compliance requirements while also determining and executing appropriate remediation where necessary. With the immediate validation and verification of compliance requirements, companies are able to reduce operational costs and confidently trust that information assets are being protected around the clock.

Our SecureOps Technology Suite

NNT’s suite of SecureOps products and services represent a comprehensive set of security, change control and compliance & assurance solutions that deliver the necessary controls to establish a solid security foundation and validate and verify the integrity of your entire IT environment at all times.

The SecureOps solution set includes:

• Asset Discovery and Inventory
• Secure System Configuration for all assets
• Regular Vulnerability Scanning
• Change Monitoring and Control
• Whitelist approved File Integrity Monitoring
• Integration with Operational Change Management Process and Systems
• Security Information and Event Log Management (SIEM)

To learn more about our product offerings, visit our products page.