A-Z of Automating Cyber Security Regulatory Compliance

May 24, 2022

Banking | 5 min READ

With a rapid migration of business ecosystems to digital and, more importantly, the cloud, cyber security is gaining more attention from the regulators. Recent cyberattacks that have resulted from non-compliant systems in operation have highlighted that cyber security compliance is a multi-billion-dollar question for enterprises today. At the same time, most businesses are struggling to secure modern architectures that underpin the digital enterprise today. Adding into the mix the security and compliance talent shortage points to a pressing need for a renewed approach to ensuring cyber security compliance. Automation is a vital aspect of this new approach to cyber security regulation and will bring multiple benefits to businesses struggling with legacy control and reporting processes.

Vikram Chandna

Sr. VP & Global Head

BFSI

Birlasoft

Mark Weston

Investor & Founder

Regulativ.ai

Consequences of Cyber Security Non-compliance

Cyber security non-compliance can hurt a business in more than one way. Here are the top two:

Cost of non-compliance

Cyber security regulations can cause fines for operating non-compliant digital systems. €746mn worth of fines levied against Amazon due to non-compliance with GDPR data processing laws is one such example.

Erosion of consumer trust

B2C businesses risk losing consumers' trust for delivering non-compliant digital services, whereas B2B enterprises attract negative publicity in their operations, thereby hurting future business prospects.

In addition, the lack of adequate cyber security compliance capabilities keeps existing teams overburdened with the task of keeping manual oversight of digital systems. Without the proper framework in place, these teams become a source of friction and delays in the otherwise efficient functioning of business operations.

Challenges in Ensuring Cyber Security Compliance

So, why aren’t more businesses operating with their digital systems in a fully compliant state? Here are a few challenges that enterprises encounter in ensuring cyber security compliance today:

Security not built-in: Cyber security is often an afterthought rather than an upfront design principle.
Legacy audit processes: Traditional audit processes assess enterprise technology configurations at points in time, which are inadequate for revealing the complete picture when it comes to compliance of digital systems over time.
Lack of capacity: Due to tighter labor markets and a shortage of cyber security talent, cyber regulatory compliance teams remain understaffed, which means they are over-burdened.
Lack of visibility: Today, the digital footprint of the enterprise is dynamic, complex, and distributed, owing to hybrid multi-cloud environments, serverless services, and containerization, to name a few.
Evolving cyber regulations: In some industries, cyber regulation laws rapidly evolve as regulators catch up with digital mass acceleration leading to missed developments.

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Fortunately, leveraging automation in cyber security compliance can quickly mitigate these challenges.

Towards Automation in Cyber Security Regulatory Compliance

Automating cyber security compliance brings several business benefits for organizations. It can bring unmatched visibility and audibility to digital systems, speed risk triaging and mitigation, ensure continuous compliance, and enhance adherence to digital governance practices within the enterprise. So, how are these benefits realized through these four pillars of cyber security regulatory compliance automation?

#1 End-to-end autonomous reporting

Cyber security compliance teams operating in manual mode are tasked with collecting security and compliance data from many digital systems. They leverage PowerShell scripts and command-line tools to extract this data from cloud services and often miss some systems residing under the umbrella of shadow IT. This data is then manually studied to measure and report compliance across the enterprise. Painful!

Cyber regulatory compliance automation entails the autonomous execution of these processes. How is this achieved? Such solutions usually leverage data connectors to query and collate security and compliance data and configurations from heterogeneous systems, identify data flow and residence patterns and use AI and visual analytics to measure and report compliance adherence levels. Moreover, some leading solutions also generate readable reports using NLP and NLG techniques to augment narratives around the discovered data and use integrations to automate the timely submission of these reports.

#2 Regulation assessment and response automation

As industry regulations around digital practices change and evolve, the CISO must stay on top of such developments and take necessary steps to ensure compliance with new regulations. Unfortunately, this also entails sourcing more data from systems and digital processes, which can add significant delays to response timeframes.

Cyber regulatory compliance automation solutions usually keep track of evolving regulations in the industry and geography of the organization's operations and automatically assess the enterprise for compliance with new regulations. Moreover, because such solutions store all security and compliance data in one place, they make it easy for the CISO to keep abreast with developments on the regulatory side and the changes in system configurations, data, control access policies, etc.

#3 Vulnerability and threat-detection automation

Many enterprises remain unaware of vulnerabilities in their system until partner organizations perform an audit. Once such audits are complete, the next step is to fix those vulnerabilities. While this may patch the systems temporarily, such vulnerabilities can arise. In addition, this is only one part of the challenge. In some industries like healthcare and medical device manufacturing, cyber security compliance also entails identifying the likelihood of threats, setting up mitigation strategies, and demonstrating risk acceptance criteria to regulators. However, most of these tasks (which are seldom possible to accomplish manually) can be automated. For example, cyber threats can be scanned in real-time, and breaches can be predicted by using threat modeling capabilities and threat intelligence from third parties. In addition, cyber security controls can be updated over time, and violations can be reported at the moment of detection using AI and automation.

#4 Closing the loop with cyber insurance

Despite the use of AI and automation in cyber security compliance, the risk of incidents continues to persist for organizations – although with a lower chance than if they operated in the manual mode. This calls for a comprehensive risk cover tailored for the organization regarding its coverage and cost. However, this process is fraught with challenges – beginning with rigid risk covers and a lack of transparency regarding pricing. However, leading cyber security compliance automation platforms such as regulativ.ai have reimagined this process to facilitate cyber insurance underwriting with transparency and customizability. With continuous monitoring of enterprise data and complete visibility into the organization’s security and compliance levels, enterprises can ensure that they receive optimal risk covers at the lowest prices.

# 5 Security by design

Map your security policies to your application design processes and require your development teams to build cyber defenses.

In today's fast-moving enterprise technology landscape, regulators' responses will evolve and shift over time. Moreover, some countries and states are still drafting cyber security compliance regulations for their geography and cyber-perimeters. When considered in conjunction with dynamic digital infrastructures and services shouldering operations in the cloud, enterprises cannot ensure compliance without support from AI and automation technologies to keep their digital systems compliant with the latest regulations. Moreover, the cost savings, efficiency gains, and productivity improvements resulting from cyber security compliance automation are hard to ignore in the light of stringent cyber laws and the rising sum of fines slammed for non-compliance. Automate your cyber security regulatory compliance function with a leading AI and ML-driven solution to achieve continuous compliance effortlessly and build greater trust in your offerings in the digital era.

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