Amidst rising cyber threats and mounting regulatory pressure, cybersecurity compliance has never been more important. With dozens of regulations, common security frameworks and prerequisites for cybersecurity insurance — including GDPR, HIPAA and ISO 27001 — navigating compliance can be overwhelming.
This challenge is exacerbated in organizations that take a reactive approach to cybersecurity. Ensuring that every device and asset, whether physical or virtual, is in compliance at all times is almost impossible to achieve unless organizations adopt a proactive approach.
The problem is twofold: many organizations lack a compliance strategy, but even the most well-intentioned organizations may struggle to gain the real-time pulse and visibility needed to collect evidence and identify and close compliance gaps. These issues compound each other. Without actionable insights, it can be difficult to build a comprehensive plan. The solution is to “shift left” on compliance.
In recent years, the term “shift left” has become synonymous with taking a proactive approach to security in DevOps. Likewise, security operations are increasingly focused on “left of boom” solutions that enable proactive risk management. As it applies to compliance, a “shift left” approach encourages organizations to streamline their processes with automation and continuous insights into gaps and risks.
A Failure to Plan Is Planning to Fail
Many organizations face compliance with the same sort of inevitable dread as tax season. Compliance is often treated as an external demand, only given attention when deadlines loom. Missed deadlines risk exposing organizations to penalties and fines, and doing the bare minimum leaves organizations vulnerable to attack.
Consequently, organizations are left scrambling to prepare for audits in a constant cycle of short-term problem-solving and last-minute fixes. These operational disruptions can strain resources and leave employees feeling stressed out. Inconsistent practices and patchwork solutions can cause chaos across teams, exacerbating the inefficiencies.
These issues are symptomatic of a reactive approach to compliance, but the root cause is that many organizations rely on manual processes to assess their asset inventory, which can be time consuming and error prone. Forget about obtaining compliance insights; most organizations cannot reliably identify all the devices on their network.
This lack of visibility causes situational blindness into the assets and devices that are part of its operations. Without this intelligence, organizations are unable to determine which assets and devices are out of compliance, creating alignment gaps. It is impossible to create an action plan to remediate out-of-compliance assets and devices if an organization cannot identify them in the first place.
Ultimately, the problem with most compliance programs is that they are not strategic.
How to Enable Strategic Compliance
A strategic approach to compliance is one that integrates compliance earlier into its lifecycle, essentially, a shift left. As previously mentioned, the concept of shift left has its origins in DevOps, where the goal is to integrate security earlier into the development lifecycle.
Automation, continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) are among the hallmarks of a shift left approach to DevOps. Manual testing and deployment processes have been largely replaced by automated systems and continuous code updates.
A shift-left approach to compliance is a shift from ad-hoc problem-solving to long-term planning. This begins with visibility into compliance obligations and risks. A comprehensive, centralized real-time view of compliance across multiple frameworks enables organizations to identify where they are vulnerable and prioritize remediation efforts.
As it relates to compliance, many routine tasks can also be automated like assessing an asset inventory. For example, automating the discovery of devices as soon as they join the network grants organizations situational awareness and serves as the foundation for establishing continuous compliance.
Continuous compliance enables organizations to identify and respond to issues as they arise, instead of scrambling to fix them at the last minute. Another benefit of establishing continuous compliance is that evidence collection can be centralized and streamlined to avoid the duplication of work across multiple audits and teams.
Automation can also enable organizations to generate detailed audit reports that identify out-of-compliance devices and assign them risk scores. Organizations can even automate the remediation of out-of-compliance devices. This is similar to how cybersecurity organizations focus on “left of boom” solutions, such as proactive risk management, to identify and remediate risks before they can be exploited by threats.
One final lesson that can be learned from a shift left approach is that it starts at the top. Just as DevOps broke down silos between development and operations teams, the same cross-functional approach is essential for compliance, including IT, security and other teams.
From regulatory requirements to cybersecurity insurance standards, compliance is a mandate, so business leaders should mandate a more mature approach to compliance. Compliance needs to be seen as a strategic advantage, not a burden. By addressing compliance continuously, organizations can future-proof their organization’s security posture.
