A growing need for better visibility into IT environments
Organizations’ IT environments grow more sprawling by the day as more devices in multiple locations connect to their networks. IT managers must ensure that none of these devices leave the organization vulnerable to a breach. Most fundamentally, protecting the organization from attack is paramount.
At the same time, a growing body of cyber regulation in multiple countries and regions sets out tough frameworks for governance and compliance and often imposes hefty fines on non-compliant organizations.
Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and senior security leaders face a major headache here. Very often, they do not have a complete picture of their organizations’ devices and connections. Research shows that more than 90% of organizations are missing up to 20% of their endpoints. That’s a real problem; you can’t protect what you can’t see – indeed, you don’t even know what you’re not seeing.
Resolving the visibility gap across their IT estate therefore must be the starting point for CISOs as they strive to ensure compliance with evolving regulations. Also, without this visibility, they’re in no position to prioritize issues for remediation or to respond quickly and decisively in the event of an exposure.
Get the basics right
In this context, CISOs and other senior IT leaders should now be asking themselves some basic questions:
- Do we have a complete picture and understanding of our technology environments?
- What processes do we have in place for detecting and monitoring potential security incidents wherever they may occur in that environment?
- Where do we have shadow IT running business critical functions?
- How do we respond to a potential threat or outright breach?
- Do the controls we have in place provide sufficient coverage?
- Where can we reduce costs by reducing with effective SBOM license management?
The ability to answer these questions not only helps to reduce risk, but leaves organizations with substantially less uncertainty, fear, and doubt. It will also support when looking to achieve compliance with regulatory obligations. CISOs should be able to articulate the security measures in place and the ongoing performance of such mitigating controls.
Identifying every endpoint in the network enables the organization to act quickly where any are exposed or non-compliant. It makes it possible to monitor the whole IT estate for risk – to continuously scan for vulnerability and compliance gaps across every managed and unmanaged endpoint.
How NCC Group and Tanium can help
NCC Group collaborates with governments and regulatory bodies, leveraging our insights and expertise to empower decision makers and help them understand cyber rules and regulations. For exclusive insights on the latest global cyber security laws and regulations, see our Global Cyber Policy Radar report.
We assist organizations spanning various industries around the world in meeting their compliance requirements and regulatory deadlines, including current fast-approaching deadlines on DORA and NIS2. Our experts also regularly support clients with regulatory and legislative requirements such as PCI, HIPAA, and SOX along with cyber security standards ISO27001, CMMC and FedRAMP to identify gaps in compliance.
By combining our people-powered cyber expertise with Tanium’s technology, security leaders can quickly get a clear view of their critical assets – what exists, where it exists, the exposure and any potential route to compromise – enabling them to build effective and appropriate security improvement programs and take control of cyber compliance and audit.
NCC Group’s asset discovery and cyber risk assessment services – powered by Tanium – are directly focused on these imperatives. By providing an accurate picture of risk and complete hardware and software asset visibility, organizations can strengthen protection of digital assets and more easily achieve full regulatory compliance.
Asset Discovery and SBOM
First, our asset discovery and software bill of materials (SBOM) service aims to provide visibility of devices across an organization’s networks to identify both devices known and those they may not previously have been aware of.
- The details of each device can then be directly imported into the organization’s configuration management database to ensure they are included in routine security management activities such as software patching and vulnerability scanning that are required to achieve regulatory compliance.
- The SBOM assessment uses Tanium’s agent to analyze software installed across the estate to identify its component parts. This makes it much easier and quicker to identify any vulnerable and non-compliant components.
Cyber Risk Assessment
NCC Group’s cyber risk assessment service measures the cyber hygiene of the organization’s estate. The service rates the estate on key risk vectors including system vulnerabilities, system compliance, administrative access and risk of lateral movement, sensitive data identification, encryption and mutual authentication, and insecure transport security protocols.
Once this assessment is complete, our consultants can weigh the findings against the organization’s business risk appetite, to provide clear guidance on areas for improvement and what is needed to achieve and maintain regulatory compliance.
Both services provide a comprehensive report outlining their current level of cyber hygiene, together with a plan for remediation. Crucially, we provide key stakeholders with a snapshot of the best practices required to manage risk and ensure compliance.
With these services, our consultants guide organizations through the process of reducing cyber risk across their digital estates. Both can be delivered as one-off assessments or conducted regularly to ensure the organization remains compliant to the cyber regulations it must meet and be able to measure its cyber resiliency.
UK Lead for Technical Assurance Services, NCC Group
Duncan has worked in the cyber security industry for over 20 years and has extensive experience designing, building, implementing, and running services to protect organisations across Financial Services, Government, Critical National Infrastructure, and Commercial sectors.