Continuous Network Security Compliance Monitoring

• IT security professionals, network administrators, and compliance officers responsible for maintaining
  secure and compliant network environments.

• How continuous monitoring provides real-time visibility into network vulnerabilities
• Review compliance with industry standards and regulations, reducing the risk of fines or penalties
• See how automated compliance monitoring reduces the manual workload

Exploring the Benefits of Continuous Network Compliance Monitoring

Ensuring network security compliance has become increasingly critical and challenging for large enterprises. Malicious actors are constantly looking for security gaps to infiltrate networks, steal data, and launch attacks. Adhering to network zero trust segmentation policies and keeping device configurations compliant are essential steps for maintaining strong governance and preventing security breaches. While most organizations recognize the importance of network compliance, configuration drift is almost inevitable, leaving many networks vulnerable and just one misstep away from unwanted headlines.

The risks posed by non-compliant (out-of-policy) network configurations are significant. Configuration drift can put the entire organization at risk of violating key compliance mandates, such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOX, SOC 2, ISO 27000, FedRAMP, FISMA, GDPR, and newer regulations, such as Digital Operational Resiliency Act (DORA), CORA, and others. Violating these regulations can lead to costly consequences: loss of business opportunities, hefty fines, reputational damage, and erosion of customer trust.

Today’s enterprise networks are extremely complex, comprising tens of thousands of devices running millions of lines of configuration code. This complexity makes it nearly impossible to maintain compliance and demonstrate control effectiveness to auditors without software support.

Organizations must ensure that components, such as routers, firewalls, load balancers, and switches, are updated with the latest security controls and configured correctly. Manually achieving this is ineffective due to several reasons:

• Time Consumption: Each device can take anywhere from 2 to 12 hours of work for engineers. This can quickly add up to days or weeks when applied across an entire network.
• Human Error: The potential for mistakes is high. Human error is the leading cause of network outages and security incidents, making manual processes risky.
• Auditing Timelines: Delays in meeting audit requirements can have severe and costly repercussions for the organization, its employees, and its customers.

Security Compliance Requires Current, Detailed, Accessible Data

Many of the global customers we work with have a general understanding of their network topology and the desired behavioral state. However, they often rely on a mix of tribal knowledge, outdated Visio diagrams, and spreadsheets, combined with their “golden config” to maintain compliance. In short, they lack accurate and detailed information about their network’s true topology, configurations, and behavior.

Network security teams frequently struggle to validate whether firewalls and other controls are functioning as expected or to identify the root cause of an issue during a security event. Security teams need to collect and analyze data from multiple vendors and configurations to consistently ensure compliance. Even highly skilled teams spend countless hours writing and maintaining data collection scripts, often dealing with various vendors and configurations.

Once the data is collected, extracting meaningful insights is a complex and time-consuming process. Engineers find themselves tangled in identifying trends, extracting relevant data, generating reports, and analyzing changes—often across hundreds of different device models and configurations.

This cumbersome process is prone to errors, leaving security engineers uncertain about the outcome and hoping that no mistakes were made along the way.

Continuous Security Compliance Audits with a Digital Twin Save Time and Improve Security

An effective network compliance strategy requires continuous network compliance monitoring. However, achieving this in today’s complex network environments—where changes are constantly being made—can be challenging. Consider the average enterprise, which manages more than 12,750 network devices and millions of lines of configuration code, all linked to hundreds of thousands of hosts and endpoints. Ensuring compliance across such a vast and intricate network would be impossible without robust software support to augment human capabilities.

With Forward Enterprise, security engineers can bypass the usual days or weeks it takes to perform manual compliance audits. The platform allows them to set up key audit controls, known as intent checks, to continuously monitor the security posture. Each time an intent check runs, it performs an audit, captures the network’s current state in a snapshot, and checks for compliance. If any non-compliant configuration is detected, engineers receive an actionable alert with detailed information on where the issue is located and how to resolve it. The snapshots can be used to respond to audit requests if needed.

Tasks that once took weeks or months are now automated and completed in minutes.

4 Steps to Continuous Network Compliance Monitoring with a Digital Twin

An effective network compliance strategy requires continuous network compliance monitoring. However, achieving this in today’s complex network environments—where changes are constantly being made—can be challenging. Consider the average enterprise, which manages more than 12,750 network devices and millions of lines of configuration code, all linked to hundreds of thousands of hosts and endpoints. Ensuring compliance across such a vast and intricate network would be impossible without robust software support to augment human capabilities.

With Forward Enterprise, security engineers can bypass the usual days or weeks it takes to perform manual compliance audits. The platform allows them to set up key audit controls, known as intent checks, to continuously monitor the security posture. Each time an intent check runs, it performs an audit, captures the network’s current state in a snapshot, and checks for compliance. If any non-compliant configuration is detected, engineers receive an actionable alert with detailed information on where the issue is located and how to resolve it. The snapshots can be used to respond to audit requests if needed.

Tasks that once took weeks or months are now automated and completed in minutes.

Why Forward Networks?

The Forward Enterprise Network Digital Twin delivers customers an average of $14.2 Million in annual benefits by enhancing staff productivity, preventing unplanned downtime, and improving operational efficiency.

Forward Enterprise gathers configuration and L2-L7 state data from network devices and public cloud platforms to create a digital twin of the entire hybrid, multi-cloud network. This digital twin allows you to view the network globally or drill down into individual devices or instances. Acting as a single source of truth, it provides NOC, Cloud, and SOC engineers with the data and insights needed to ensure that security policies are enforced and the network remains reliable. By collecting and analyzing information across all devices and their behavior, Forward Enterprise simplifies critical but tedious tasks, ensuring security posture and compliance are maintained as intended.

Forward Networks’ digital twin supports devices from all major networking vendors and cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. This enables network operators to ensure their networks are secure, reliable, and flexible.

The data collected and analyzed by the Forward Networks Digital Twin supports various use cases that keep the network agile and secure, ensuring it behaves as expected.