Can You Prove What’s Happening in Your Backup Environment?
Most businesses are bound by at least one set of IT compliance requirements, such as FISMA, GDPR, HIPAA, PCI, or SOX. That makes IT compliance audits a fact of life. If you’ve been on the receiving end of a security breach, risk management, or compliance audit, then you know how important it is to be able to track and demonstrate the current and past state of all operations and events so you can be ready when the auditors arrive.
That’s because the penalties for a failed audit can be significant. A compliance failure with FISMA could result in loss of federal funding, government hearings, increased government oversight, and prohibition from future government contracts, depending on the severity of the violation. Failing a SOX audit can lead to fines, removal from public stock exchanges, and invalidation of Directors and Officers (D&O) insurance policies, not to mention jail time for CEOs and CFOs that knowingly submit incorrect certifications.
No Audit Readiness = Security Risk
A lack of tracking and auditing capabilities creates a significant security risk that puts the whole organization in jeopardy. This is especially true for enterprise backup operations.
If you can not clearly and quickly see what is happening in every nook and cranny of your data protection landscape, then there is a good chance you are missing something. Those penalties referred to earlier are handed out for good reason. A failed audit indicates holes in the security infrastructure that could lead to:
- Ransomware attacks
- Company data breaches
- Operational shutdowns
- Harm to your company’s customers
- Loss of reputation
Any one of these risks could significantly damage the business.
How to Eliminate Compliance Risks with Audit Readiness
Visibility and audit readiness should be key security components of any data protection solution. Audit readiness for backup includes several capabilities such as:
- Visibility into the entire environment
- Tracking of all operations and events and players
- Ability to report on and prove what’s happened in your backup environment
- Compliance monitoring for all backup components and data
- Analysis of unusual activity and alerting for suspected events
Unfortunately, many backup product providers completely overlook this critical customer security requirement of audit readiness. When the need for visibility is not addressed in the backup software and infrastructure, customers are tasked with managing any internal or external audit requests manually. This approach is resource-intensive and often incomplete.
Compass from Cobalt Iron offers customers an alternative to expensive, risky manual auditing processes by including robust auditing capabilities in every customer's environment as part of the core features. In fact, Compass is the only enterprise-class backup solution to offer comprehensive and continuous audit readiness across backup infrastructure, data, and operations.
Compass helps customers pass challenging audits with flying colors by:
- Providing visibility into all components and operations in the backup landscape
- Tracking all operations, activities, and events
- Demonstrating preparedness with audit-ready reports
- Ensuring continual software licensing, service level, and policy compliance
- Analyzing operations for irregularities and gives event notifications
With consistent and increasing cyber threats, companies need to be able to prove compliance with all cybersecurity and data protection regulations — not only to pass their audits but to ensure complete data protection for the business.
Would you be able to do it?
Learn more about Compass and transforming the experience of data backup at your organization.
Download a comparison of Compass to a typical backup approach here >>
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