Whether it is PCI, CoCo, SOX, HIPAA or MIFID, overcoming the next compliance ‘hurdle’ can be an enormous drain on already overstretched IT resources.

As well as being highly disruptive, compliance mandates, and the compliance auditors who scrutinise organisations against them, place extraordinary demands upon logging, reporting and auditing processes.  Frustratingly, these will be different for every compliance requirement and, because there are few hard-and-fast guidelines about what really constitutes compliance, they will emerge in unique response to an organisation’s business apparatus.

The resulting mish-mash of compliance management systems, controls and templates can take an age to construct, cost a huge budget to maintain, and consume significant resources to develop and improve.  To alleviate these problems, and improve the ongoing compliance status of your organisation, automation of these processes is essential.

AUTOMATED IT RATING: 4.4

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Databases hold the most critical information within an organisation, and so require a tightly orchestrated range of controls to secure and audit their usage.

Many such controls are manual, making them very expensive and time-consuming to manage, and have difficulty keeping pace as application versions, staff members and threats constantly evolve.

Automation of database security controls, meanwhile, can dramatically increase the efficiency of security enforcement, assure compliance to mandates such as PCI & SOX, and improve working practices.  Without it, organisations struggle to maintain intelligence around what databases exist, how they are patched, who has access to them, and what individual access policies allow.  The problem is compounded within multi-vendor database environments.

Being able to accelerate security and compliance enables organisations to drive down costs but also decrease the risks inherent with managing databases. Organisations seeking to protect themselves from attack by the implementation of controls can minimise risk and effectively secure their database assets through automation.

AUTOMATED IT RATING: 4.7

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