Co-authored by Gavin Littleboy
Challenges in Community Compliance
Authorities companies face important challenges in sustaining community compliance as a result of ever-increasing complexity of rules. From NIST 800-53, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, to different safety requirement guides like DISA Safety Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) for Division of Protection, complete measures require configuring and sustaining networks to make sure they keep compliant and are safe in opposition to vulnerabilities and threats. Compounding this challenge are the restricted budgets and assets out there inside authorities entities, which might make it troublesome to allocate adequate personnel and instruments to handle compliance successfully. Moreover, the necessity to combine numerous applied sciences and legacy programs additional complicates compliance efforts. These programs usually lack the pliability wanted to adapt shortly to new and evolving threats, making the duty of attaining and sustaining steady compliance an ongoing battle. Companies are how automation and orchestration might help with these challenges.
Evolution of NetOps and SecOps Groups
The evolution of NetOps and SecOps groups is reworking how authorities companies method community compliance and safety.
NetOps, DevOps, SecOps confused? See particulars right here – What’s NetOps?
Historically working in silos, these groups are actually more and more required to collaborate and handle shared challenges. NetOps groups need to deploy steady community automation and validation to simplify operations, improve velocity and effectivity to ship providers, and enhance efficiency and resiliency of vital community infrastructure. SecOps groups are always responding to evolving threats equivalent to vulnerabilities created from configuration errors, uncared for updates, and never having ample visibility into safety posture, delaying response efforts.
The Want for Automation to Scale
Automation is required to scale these efforts, enabling groups to effectively handle routine duties and reply swiftly to threats as community calls for develop. Many technical challenges exist in automating community compliance. For instance, what are we in search of on the subject of community compliance? For networks, we’re validating end-of-life tools, code variations, CVE/PSIRTs (Frequent Vulnerabilities and Exposures/Product Safety Incident Response Groups), Safety Implementation guides equivalent to DoD STIG, and community and organizational requirements. As this listing of compliance concerns demonstrates, there are numerous touchpoints that shortly make compliance a difficult activity and turns into a “firefight” state of affairs the place all assets are urgently targeted to make amends for compliance earlier than the subsequent audit. Because it pertains to community configurations, there are three patterns in compliance checks.
Patterns Round Community Compliance
A given compliance requirement necessitates the evaluation of both a community configuration or community state. These checks typically fall into 3 evaluation patterns: match configuration, match variables, or match enterprise logic.
Configuration matches search for actual matches in configuration. Examples embody disabling or enabling of providers equivalent to http or password-encryption. Variable matches search for partial or variable substitution matches in configuration. Examples embody validating that a number of NTP (Community Time Protocol) servers are configured or that configured BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) neighbors are utilizing authentication. Enterprise logic matches search for organizationally outlined patterns in configuration. Examples embody validating {that a} boundary entry management listing is utilized to the right interface and that it blocks organizational outlined protocols. This final sample is essentially the most complicated to implement and varies broadly between organizations primarily based on the native implementation of the required coverage.
In the present day, SecOps groups use their area particular auditing instruments to audit the community and create stories. These stories are then shared with the NetOps crew who should interpret, translate to community area configurations, after which implement the community change. This prolonged course of then repeats.
Automation Allows Steady Compliance
Think about a community automation platform the place NetOps and SecOps can leverage unified tooling to unravel widespread targets and allow steady compliance auditing, reporting, and remediation. Safety groups sometimes describe compliance “intent” within the type of guidelines that validate whether or not a community configuration satisfies the standards. Community operators should fulfill not solely these compliance necessities, however community design necessities and different components when making a last template to be utilized to the community.
Cisco Crosswork Community Companies Orchestrator (NSO) supplies this functionality by enabling community operators to automate and handle complicated networks with ease with a built-in compliance engine to validate community compliance. It provides a flexible and highly effective resolution that helps configuration administration, service orchestration, and network-wide coverage enforcement. Cisco NSO 6.x comes with important compliance updates equivalent to compliance templates, an intuitive compliance reporting interface, and continues to introduce options to cowl the patterns above. Cisco NSO has fashionable APIs and a stateful database the place steady compliance could be validated primarily based on real-time community state and reported as much as northbound programs. Cisco NSO can be model-driven, which means knowledge fashions and their intents can straight be translated to supposed implementation state within the community. This permits a brand new paradigm for SecOps groups to have the ability to audit and report compliance checks with the identical tooling and configuration templates that the NetOps crew have outlined for the community for remediation. With Cisco NSO, groups can guarantee constant compliance throughout multi-vendor community components, streamline operations, and improve collaboration between totally different groups inside a company.
To be taught extra about Cisco Crosswork NSO or to see examples of methods to construct compliance templates, see under.
Compliance Reporting Examples Repository on NSO Developer GitHub
Closing Ideas
Because the roles inside NetOps and SecOps evolve, fostering a tradition of studying and flexibility ensures that personnel can successfully handle new applied sciences and regulatory necessities. By constructing cross-functional experience and problem-solving capabilities, companies can handle present compliance wants and anticipate future calls for, resulting in extra resilient and responsive operations. Reaching efficient compliance options and leveraging automation yields substantial returns on funding (ROI) for presidency companies, leading to notable price financial savings and enabling companies to allocate assets extra strategically and deal with their core missions. This not solely protects the company’s repute but additionally ensures the uninterrupted supply of important providers.
To dive deeper into community compliance and automation, be a part of us at Cisco Stay San Diego from June 8-12, 2025 for 2 insightful periods exploring methods and options to boost your community operations:
DEVNET-2144 – “Automating Community Compliance: Leveraging Cisco NSO for Compliance Auditing, Reporting, and Remediation”
DEVWKS-2083 – “The Journey of Automating Community Compliance utilizing Cisco NSO”
If you need to be taught extra about how Cisco might help your compliance wants or to get began in your Automation Journey, attain out to your Account Staff.
Further Related Hyperlinks
Study extra about different Cisco options to assist authorities companies with compliance
Cisco SaaS Compliant Product Availability
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