CIO Resolution #7: Be Always Ready for a Compliance Audit

This is the seventh in our several part series, “CIO Resolutions for 2015.”

Problem: Compliance audits cost you hundreds of valuable staff hours.

Let’s face it – IT is becoming a regulated industry. Compliance mandates like PCI DSS affect any company processing credit cards, SOX requirements are essentially a tax for public companies and growing startups, and healthcare providers dread HIPAA audits. Financial services companies live or die by their ability to implement GLBA controls. Honoring compliance obligations without monitoring automation is a recipe for costly penalties.

Solution: Use pre-configured rules and reports to achieve continuous compliance

AccelOps customers benefit from more than 2,500 pre-configured rules and reports. Many are specifically designed to make preparing for compliance audits one-click easy. Rather than commandeering IT resources two weeks before audit reports are due, IT managers use AccelOps to generate compliance reports automatically for all of the following: PCI DSS, SOX, NERC, GLBA, GPG13, FISMA, COBIT, ITIL, ISO, HIPPA, and SANS Critical Controls.

The ROI of using AccelOps for compliance is immediate. One of our financial services customers was required to produce quarterly GLBA compliance reports. It was a full-time job for three IT system administrators for three weeks per quarter. During this time they would manually parse terabyes of logs to find all instances of specific security events like unauthorized server access.

Once they implemented AccelOps, all of those events were automatically tracked, correlated, and delivered as pre-configured reports and dashboards. In addition to automating GLBA compliance for security, the company also gained health of network visibility into server and application performance and availability.

Tomorrow we’ll discuss CIO Resolution #8: Monitor Entire Business Services … Not Just Hardware or Apps