If you have experience with hardening IT infrastructure, you know that the compliance process takes too long, costs too much money, and involves too many manual processes that leave teams frustrated and talking past each other.
It’s tough out there. And with increasingly complex environments, more rapid innovation, and more aggressive adversaries, it only seems to be getting harder to keep up.
But for all of the frustration, what’s less understood is where the gaps in this process lie, and how to bridge them. When the Sicura team was mired in the process of obtaining ATOs (Authorization to Operate) at the National Security Agency, it was tough to see what was causing taking months and costing millions. But when they zoomed out, they saw how the compliance process was fragmented between teams, tools, and workflows, creating too much manual work (and rework). When a system got through ATO, it was usually the result of workarounds and heroics. But if we are truly going to shift left and implement security and compliance into the full development lifecycle, a completely new approach is necessary.
An essential building block of this new paradigm is teams, tools, and processes that work together. A more integrated compliance process must have systems that allow teams to speak the same language, data to easily pass between teams and tools, and workflows that are automated and always-on. Compliance is absolutely critical, but it shouldn’t cause unnecessary downtime, disruption or extra work.
To make this a reality, we must create a new paradigm to bring together security, compliance, engineering and operations: Security control management. That’s why we built Sicura with specific principles that are just as core to our platform as code. In this blogpost, we’ll cover how integration will benefit compliance teams at every layer, and while enabling a more seamless compliance process that is driven by automation.
Engineering teams are a critical, yet often overlooked, driver of the compliance process.
At NSA, our co-founders, Lisa Umberger and Kendall Moore, saw how the critical gap between security and engineering teams was dragging out compliance from weeks to months. Security would hand over scan results to engineering in spreadsheets, but engineering lacked any instructions or insight of how to take the recommended fixes, and implement them. As months turned into a year and a year turned into 18 months, security and engineering kept talking past each other. The teams didn’t speak the same language, and they couldn’t get on the same page.
But Lisa and Kendall realized that change didn’t have to come from teaching engineers how to do security.
Rather, they needed to build an engineering platform that integrated security components from the ground up.
As pracititioners, they wanted a tool that was by engineers, for engineers.
That set the tone for Sicura from the start, and continues to be the guiding light for the product roadmap today.
From security to engineering to GRC to operations, compliance brings together multiple teams, each of whom rely on their own tools to get work done. While these tools are tuned for the audience they serve, they often don’t work together. Security scanners, GRC platforms, and IT Operations tools each play an important role in the Risk Management Framework, but they aren’t built to be part of one process. This slows down the exchange of data between teams, and makes it more likely that something will be lost in the process.
Sicura’s API-based platform is tailor-made to provide the missing link, and provide an end-to-end process that automates technical compliance. Teams can integrate third-party scanners such as Nessus by Tenable or CIS Assessor, then plug scan results into configuration management systems.
With Sicura’s capabilities, this makes it easier not only to spot a problem, but to fix it. When a failed benchmark pops up, Sicura provides automated remediation based on scan results. Closing gaps provides a path to a system that is not only self-policing, but self-healing.
In a hybrid world, teams must manage hybrid infrastructures, multiple tools, and constantly spin up new environments. They rely on workflows to break processes down into individual tasks that align teams and tools.
Since compliance involves so many teams, the tasks and results that are provided to teams are typically not ready for workflows.
In particular, engineers rely on workflows such as DevSecOps, CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code to continuously build, deploy, and maintain products. When security delivers scan results in a spreadsheet, engineering teams want them to be actionable artifacts. This is one of the major breakdown points in the compliance process.
To solve this, Sicura provides capabilities to map security catalogs as artifacts such as YAML, AMIs, or another build script. For instance, teams can take benchmarks, security controls, control families and catalogs representing standards such as DISA STIG or NIST 800-53 Rev 5 from GRC tools such as RegScale, and boil controls down into the artifacts needed to provision, configure, and monitor your IT infrastructure.
Engineers can take these artifacts from Sicura, and put them into a pipeline for new or updated systems. With this process, security and engineering don’t have to learn each other’s world, and there’s no disruption required to integrate security directly into a build.
Integrating tools, teams, and workflows doesn’t just combine the forces of already-powerful tools. It creates an end-to-end process that connects the disparate parts of compliance, and reduces the back-and-forth between teams in the process.
It adds up to a solution that is more than the sum of its parts. Sicura provides a cycle of security control management, ensuring that tools are always-on, and reducing manual work required. That way, security and engineering teams can spend less time navigating bureaucracy, and more time solving real problems.
Integration is just one of Sicura’s powerful capabilities. Want to learn more about Sicura’s Security Control Management solutions? Book a demo today.
If you have experience with hardening IT infrastructure, you know that the compliance process takes too long, costs too much money, and involves too many manual processes that leave teams frustrated and talking past each other.
It’s tough out there. And with increasingly complex environments, more rapid innovation, and more aggressive adversaries, it only seems to be getting harder to keep up.
But for all of the frustration, what’s less understood is where the gaps in this process lie, and how to bridge them. When the Sicura team was mired in the process of obtaining ATOs (Authorization to Operate) at the National Security Agency, it was tough to see what was causing taking months and costing millions. But when they zoomed out, they saw how the compliance process was fragmented between teams, tools, and workflows, creating too much manual work (and rework). When a system got through ATO, it was usually the result of workarounds and heroics. But if we are truly going to shift left and implement security and compliance into the full development lifecycle, a completely new approach is necessary.
An essential building block of this new paradigm is teams, tools, and processes that work together. A more integrated compliance process must have systems that allow teams to speak the same language, data to easily pass between teams and tools, and workflows that are automated and always-on. Compliance is absolutely critical, but it shouldn’t cause unnecessary downtime, disruption or extra work.
To make this a reality, we must create a new paradigm to bring together security, compliance, engineering and operations: Security control management. That’s why we built Sicura with specific principles that are just as core to our platform as code. In this blogpost, we’ll cover how integration will benefit compliance teams at every layer, and while enabling a more seamless compliance process that is driven by automation.
Engineering teams are a critical, yet often overlooked, driver of the compliance process.
At NSA, our co-founders, Lisa Umberger and Kendall Moore, saw how the critical gap between security and engineering teams was dragging out compliance from weeks to months. Security would hand over scan results to engineering in spreadsheets, but engineering lacked any instructions or insight of how to take the recommended fixes, and implement them. As months turned into a year and a year turned into 18 months, security and engineering kept talking past each other. The teams didn’t speak the same language, and they couldn’t get on the same page.
But Lisa and Kendall realized that change didn’t have to come from teaching engineers how to do security.
Rather, they needed to build an engineering platform that integrated security components from the ground up.
As pracititioners, they wanted a tool that was by engineers, for engineers.
That set the tone for Sicura from the start, and continues to be the guiding light for the product roadmap today.
From security to engineering to GRC to operations, compliance brings together multiple teams, each of whom rely on their own tools to get work done. While these tools are tuned for the audience they serve, they often don’t work together. Security scanners, GRC platforms, and IT Operations tools each play an important role in the Risk Management Framework, but they aren’t built to be part of one process. This slows down the exchange of data between teams, and makes it more likely that something will be lost in the process.
Sicura’s API-based platform is tailor-made to provide the missing link, and provide an end-to-end process that automates technical compliance. Teams can integrate third-party scanners such as Nessus by Tenable or CIS Assessor, then plug scan results into configuration management systems.
With Sicura’s capabilities, this makes it easier not only to spot a problem, but to fix it. When a failed benchmark pops up, Sicura provides automated remediation based on scan results. Closing gaps provides a path to a system that is not only self-policing, but self-healing.
In a hybrid world, teams must manage hybrid infrastructures, multiple tools, and constantly spin up new environments. They rely on workflows to break processes down into individual tasks that align teams and tools.
Since compliance involves so many teams, the tasks and results that are provided to teams are typically not ready for workflows.
In particular, engineers rely on workflows such as DevSecOps, CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code to continuously build, deploy, and maintain products. When security delivers scan results in a spreadsheet, engineering teams want them to be actionable artifacts. This is one of the major breakdown points in the compliance process.
To solve this, Sicura provides capabilities to map security catalogs as artifacts such as YAML, AMIs, or another build script. For instance, teams can take benchmarks, security controls, control families and catalogs representing standards such as DISA STIG or NIST 800-53 Rev 5 from GRC tools such as RegScale, and boil controls down into the artifacts needed to provision, configure, and monitor your IT infrastructure.
Engineers can take these artifacts from Sicura, and put them into a pipeline for new or updated systems. With this process, security and engineering don’t have to learn each other’s world, and there’s no disruption required to integrate security directly into a build.
Integrating tools, teams, and workflows doesn’t just combine the forces of already-powerful tools. It creates an end-to-end process that connects the disparate parts of compliance, and reduces the back-and-forth between teams in the process.
It adds up to a solution that is more than the sum of its parts. Sicura provides a cycle of security control management, ensuring that tools are always-on, and reducing manual work required. That way, security and engineering teams can spend less time navigating bureaucracy, and more time solving real problems.
Integration is just one of Sicura’s powerful capabilities. Want to learn more about Sicura’s Security Control Management solutions? Book a demo today.
Ready to maintain secure and compliant infrastructure focused on cost, automation, and consistency?