The to-do list for modern-day enterprises is basically neverending, but one priority that never strays from the top of that list is the need to deliver a secure and compliant environment. This is no small feat; modern enterprises rely on extremely complex and specialized systems. As they grow, evolve, and mature, these systems only become more complex and intricate, which can make them prone to security threats. Furthermore, enterprises are held to intense compliance standards, whether due to a highly regulated industry (like Finance, Government, or IT) or the sheer magnitude of the organization on a global scale. One of the best ways for enterprises to address these challenges is through comprehensive tracking and auditing practices.
All this complexity puts tremendous pressure on enterprise IT organizations to continually respond to business requirements while at the same time ensuring the security of corporate data and keeping up with ever-changing compliance requirements. To help meet these, and often other unique enterprise demands, we offer our self-managed enterprise product line, Data Center, now with an advanced auditing feature designed to directly address the hurdles that many large-scale organizations need to overcome.
Introducing advanced auditing for Data Center
For modern enterprises, security and compliance are no longer just checkboxes; they’re essential contributors to key business initiatives such as growth potential and competitive advantage. To help organizations capture their full potential, we’re excited to introduce our newest Data Center available feature: advanced auditing. Advanced auditing provides organizations the visibility and security-relevant digital records needed to help demonstrate compliance, improve security, and improve workflow.
Providing enterprises the ability to help adhere to corporate policies around information security and compliance, along with the insights they need to understand what’s happening in their organization.
How advanced auditing benefits your organization
There are three key strategic benefits advanced auditing delivers to organizations.
1. Increased security
Protecting proprietary information and enterprise security is absolutely critical for any organization. We mentioned the complexity inherent in enterprise systems, and that the larger the organization, the more intricate these systems often become. From a security standpoint, this means there are many more points of vulnerability to monitor, maintain, and, if necessary, cauterize. Advanced auditing includes features and capabilities such as the extended audit log and file externalization, offering not only the information you need to take action and prevent future security threats, but also tamperproof long-term storage options for your records. Security threats can come in all different shapes and sizes, and from both internal and external actors.
How does this benefit you day-in, day-out? Let’s take unsuccessful login attempts as an example. These can often be a common indicator of brute-force attacks, or users trying to access projects and issues they don’t have permission to see. If you aren’t already using an external identity provider, you can regularly scan the improved audit log to identify suspicious activities like unsuccessful login attempts.
Enterprise security will only continue to be a top initiative for organizations as threats are constantly evolving. With stats showing roughly 80 percent of IT security leaders experiencing at least one cybersecurity incident over the last 12 months that was so severe it required a board-level meeting and more than a third of breaches in 2018 involving an internal actor, any increase in security can be a critical competitive advantage.
2. Help demonstrating compliance
While the ability to demonstrate compliance might not be as “sexy” as security, it shouldn’t be a laborious task, especially as regulatory requirements are continuing to increase on global, national, and even local levels. Continuous regulatory change is consistently ranked as a major challenge for compliance officers, and advanced auditing’s extended event coverage helps protect your people, practices, and organization by creating a detailed forensic log of activity that can be securely exported to third-party monitoring tools for secure storage and easy retrieval.
Whether you’re striving to meet federally regulated or internal standards, advanced auditing brings increased visibility to those items that need to be verified when proving compliance – without taking time and resources away from other projects. What might this look like in your organization? You now have the ability to ensure the correct development processes are being followed, there’s protocols around controlled information, and privileged users are being monitored – or, as we like to call it, “audit the auditors.”
3. Improved visibility and workflow
Advanced auditing isn’t just beneficial for corporate-level demands. Its capabilities drastically improve the lives of admins, which, in turn, is beneficial to everyone. The ability to quickly garner insights and visibility into an instance directly from the UI allows admins to stay informed and make important decisions to assist in risk prevention and management. And capabilities such as audit delegation allow admins to reduce the time spent on simple requests and unblock teams by giving them the visibility and agility needed to get their work done.
All of this amounts to better efficiency and workflow for teams across the organization, in addition to admins enjoying a better, more immediate understanding of what is happening in an instance. If something goes wrong or is done in error, admins have the ability to walk back the issue in a timely manner thanks to a detailed log of events, resolving issues for the organization faster while saving the admin from having to go on a wild goose chase to identify root causes.
Want to learn more about these capabilities? Check out our webinar on how you can keep your Data Center instance compliant and secure with new features like advanced auditing.
Want to learn more about the security and compliance landscape? Watch our series on the state of enterprise security and compliance.