As companies add more applications, users, and devices, their internal teams struggle with manual compliance and controls testing and tracking processes. This makes continuous insight into their controls’ effectiveness and managing security programs expensive and time-consuming.
What is Continuous Controls Monitoring?
Continuous controls monitoring (CCM) supports risk and compliance programs and reduces the costs of audits by using automation to monitor and act on cybersecurity controls’ effectiveness. CCM can be implemented across the control management lifecycle for cost-effective, efficient security and compliance program management and documentation by:
- Collecting data and logs from multiple sources
- Testing controls’ effectiveness in sustainable and year-round reports
- Reporting testing results
- Mapping controls to compliance frameworks such as NIST Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF) v2.0
As a critical tool for enterprise governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) programs, CCM platforms enable organizations to create year-round, data-driven operational processes. By breaking down data and functional silos, CCM enables organizations to:
- Clarify roles to maintain governance
- Assign and track responsibilities across operational managers, risk management, and internal audit
- Connect, aggregate, and deduplicate data generated by diverse, high-volume business and cybersecurity technology stacks
- Collaborate more effectively across IT, security, risk, and compliance teams
- Expand testing coverage and accuracy by reducing reliance on sample-based processes
- Reduce compliance and audit costs by making documentation more readily available
What is the business case for CCM?
CCM improves control implementation that can lead to reduced cyber risk.
Identify and remediate control gaps
By providing continuous, real-time insights into controls’ effectiveness, CCM enhances the organization’s compliance program by enabling:
- Prioritization of critical remediation activities to address at-risk resources
- Reduced compliance violation risk by rapidly identifying control gaps
- Data-based insights for key performance indicators (KPIs) and compliance trends
- Informed recommendations about business strategy and future security investments
- Mapping internal policies and controls to key cybersecurity and data protection compliance frameworks, like NIST Cybersecurity Framework, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), ISO 27001, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
Proactive cyber risk identification and mitigation
CCM tools ingest security telemetry and metadata from diverse sources and enrich that data with business context for insights into how well the cybersecurity risk management strategy works. With CCM, organizations go beyond check-the-box compliance practices that improve their overall security by:
- Establishing baseline behavior for users, network activity, and systems
- Creating data-centric risk measurements for security controls’ effectiveness
- Identifying control gaps across people, processes, and technologies that can create risk
Reduced audit costs
CCM enables automated and continuous data-driven insights by testing controls and measuring the outcomes against established baselines to iterate and improve their programs. Since the automation documents these activities, they can answer compliance questions faster with evidence proving adherence to security controls, policies, and procedures.
Increased transparency and improved communication
By consolidating accurate data in a single location, CCM enhances collaboration across operational managers, risk management, and internal audit. Diverse stakeholders communicate more effectively and efficiently throughout the compliance lifecycle to:
- Define control objectives
- Evaluate control implementation
- Ensure accountability
- Monitor control effectiveness
Optimized resource allocation
With a data-centric CCM solution, organizations can use KPIs to help allocate staffing and technology resources more effectively. CCM solutions automate low-value, repetitive tasks, enabling organizations to appropriately allocate personnel to high-value activities, like closing control gaps. Some measurable CCM insights include trends like:
- Compliance to identify additional audit and risk management needs
- Incident detection, investigation, and response times to identify security analyst and tool needs
- Audit time and costs to identify documentation or staffing needs
How does CCM improve security and compliance?
An organization's compliance posture acts as a way to double check its ability to manage security. By automating compliance using CCM, organizations gain insight into how well they manage key security objectives like:
- Asset management: Identifying new or unknown devices on the network to maintain a consistent, up-to-date system of record
- Vulnerability and patch management: Connecting data to real-world users and devices to identify asset owners responsible for applying security updates to at-risk devices
- Configuration management: Improving configuration management database documentation to ensure up-to-date, accurate configurations that comply with policies
