Certification has always been a great way for companies to establish trust with their customers. As modern companies gather increasing amounts of data, and as data privacy concerns mount, cyber compliance is now more important than ever.
While there’s certainly an argument to be made that certification doesn’t necessarily make your company more secure, today’s buyers need to know that they’ve done their due diligence, and trust seals do help in that regard. What’s more, because the process of preparing for certification forces us to look at our security posures from the perspective of a universal framework, compliance teams often find themselves taking important measures to tighten things up, which certainly helps.
In this sense, CISOs play a crucial role in the certification process, given the intersection between government regulations, compliance certification organizations’ security standards, and data protection policies. As certification standards grow more complex, CISOs face significant hurdles in ensuring their organizations receive cyber GRC certification successfully.
Here are a few ways CISOs can minimize friction when preparing for certification and ensure a smooth process.
Automate Compliance Checks
Gathering and verifying documentation is one of a CISO’s most challenging tasks when preparing for certification. Whether reviewing code bases or verifying infrastructure standards, CISOs often struggle to gather documentation on time and verify adherence to standards.
There’s also a human angle CISOs struggle with. Most of these details are maintained by busy teams that cannot spare time to compile data to aid the CISO. This leaves the latter walking a fine line between seeking internal cooperation and communicating the importance of certification.
Automation is a great way to reduce the burden of these cyber GRC tasks. CISOs can use software to connect different parts of their infrastructure, review them for compliance, and automatically create audit trails. For instance, Cypago gives users a quick onboarding process, getting to know their compliance goals. Once done, the tool connects to the platforms that control a company’s infrastructure, reconciling the findings against in-built compliance checklists and templates.
The result is an effective, dynamic gap analysis that prioritizes remediation, instead of manual document gathering.
Given the number of regulations worldwide, expecting a CISO to keep pace with every change is unrealistic. Cypago automatically updates their logic to reflect the latest changes, giving CISOs all the reports and action items they need to ensure efficient certification prep.
Check-ins with Legal Teams
While automated tools can help speed up analysis, they also highlight elements for manual review and follow-up. After all, every company is different, and automated processes can’t yet account for every edge case out there.
Legal team input is also vital when CISOs need to make a business case for an undercovered risk. For instance, a gap overlooked by the business might have a strong technical case, but a CISO might struggle to convey its gravity in business terms.
A legal team can assist in this regard, painting the right context for executive stakeholders and board members. Often, modifying security strategies can benefit from legal input. A CISO might be unaware of changes to certification requirements or potential future developments.
In these scenarios, current changes might secure a certification, but as requirements evolve, re-certification might be needed, increasing costs. A legal team’s input in this situation will save the company money and time.
In short, a legal team may not have the technical expertise to execute compliance-related tasks, but it will give the CISO the right context for the company’s risks and how to best position themselves to ensure certification.
Secure Infrastructure Sprawl
Today’s digital-first companies rely on a dispersed set of containers and microservices. Cloud computing has resulted in compartmentalized servers each accessed by machine-based services to power apps. While this design favors quick releases, it often creates a security headache.
For starters, companies don’t fully control their secrets or the keys to them. In many cases, cloud service providers safeguard data and own keys fully. However, even before considering the lack of security key control, most companies are unaware of the extent of their own infrastructure sprawl.
Given the extent of the sprawl, CISOs cannot realistically expect to cover every single node and validate it before certification. Tools like Solarwinds’ Network Topology Mapper are invaluable here, helping CISOs quickly conduct network discovery exercises and detect changes to network endpoints automatically.
These tools also create handy network maps that are critical to a smooth certification process. In addition to documenting their networks, CISOs must also validate access control policies and key storage to confirm authorized access.
Automating access monitoring and security certificate renewal is the best way for CISOs to ensure their infrastructure remains secure at all times, with minimal manual intervention.
Continuously Monitor Security
Continuous monitoring tools are standard in cybersecurity these days, and with good reason. They ensure a company’s security posture keeps pace with the latest threats, creating audit logs for each change.
Cybersecurity is central to almost every cyber GRC certification process, and continuous monitoring ensures a company will have a smooth time of it.
Dynatrace is one of the most respected continuous monitoring solutions in the industry, as it supports thorough visibility and AI-enhanced workflows. Indeed, in addition to using the right continuous monitoring tools, CISOs must back them up with the right processes.
For instance, conducting regular pentests will reveal gaps in existing security frameworks, giving organizations enough time to fix them, and record any changes to documentation, placing them in an ideal position come certification time.
Organization Is Key
Securing cyber GRC certification is critical for modern companies, and organizing all available information is stage one. CISOs play a central role in this process, and with the right approach, they can create a smooth compliance workflow for their organizations.