Co-authored by Gavin Littleboy
Challenges in Community Compliance
Authorities companies face vital 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 concern are the restricted budgets and sources accessible 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 techniques additional complicates compliance efforts. These techniques typically lack the flexibleness wanted to adapt rapidly to new and evolving threats, making the duty of attaining and sustaining steady compliance an ongoing wrestle. Businesses are taking a look at how automation and orchestration will help with these challenges.
Evolution of NetOps and SecOps Groups
The evolution of NetOps and SecOps groups is remodeling how authorities companies strategy community compliance and safety.
NetOps, DevOps, SecOps confused? See particulars right here – What’s NetOps?
Historically working in silos, these groups at the moment are more and more required to collaborate and handle shared challenges. NetOps groups need to deploy steady community automation and validation to simplify operations, enhance pace and effectivity to ship providers, and enhance efficiency and resiliency of important community infrastructure. SecOps groups are always responding to evolving threats akin 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 searching for in relation to community compliance? For networks, we’re validating end-of-life gear, code variations, CVE/PSIRTs (Frequent Vulnerabilities and Exposures/Product Safety Incident Response Groups), Safety Implementation guides akin to DoD STIG, and community and organizational requirements. As this record of compliance concerns demonstrates, there are lots of touchpoints that rapidly make compliance a difficult process and turns into a “firefight” situation the place all sources are urgently targeted to compensate 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 akin 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 record is utilized to the proper interface and that it blocks organizational outlined protocols. This final sample is probably the most complicated to implement and varies extensively between organizations primarily based on the native implementation of the required coverage.
At present, SecOps groups use their area particular auditing instruments to audit the community and create studies. These studies are then shared with the NetOps group 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 usually describe compliance “intent” within the type of guidelines that validate whether or not a community configuration satisfies the factors. Community operators should fulfill not solely these compliance necessities, however community design necessities and different elements when making a ultimate template to be utilized to the community.
Cisco Crosswork Community Providers Orchestrator (NSO) gives 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 vital compliance updates akin 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 may be validated primarily based on real-time community state and reported as much as northbound techniques. Cisco NSO can be model-driven, that means information fashions and their intents can straight be translated to meant 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 group 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 corporation.
To be taught extra about Cisco Crosswork NSO or to see examples of how one can 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. Attaining efficient compliance options and leveraging automation yields substantial returns on funding (ROI) for presidency companies, leading to notable value financial savings and enabling companies to allocate sources extra strategically and give attention to their core missions. This not solely protects the company’s fame 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 classes exploring methods and options to reinforce 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 will 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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