Managing security in a compliance-crazy world

The laws seem to be shooting out of Congress like arrows aimed at the hearts and budgets of IT administrators across corporate America. Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, Basel II, and a host of other regulations are pushing IT security management into extremely difficult and potentially expensive territory.

“It’ll probably take years for many organizations to become fully compliant because the rules are so vague,” says Mark Amaher, security administrator at Ochsner Clinic Foundation, a large hospital in New Orleans with 60 satellite offices throughout Louisiana. “We’ve been actively working on HIPAA compliance from the technical side for over a year, and it’s hard because the rules simply don’t specify what’s required other than audit logs of who accesses protected data stores. How you enforce those rules, however, is up to you.”

Coping with this uncertainty presents an altogether new challenge for IT security administrators. It’s almost as if actual security has taken a backseat to security documentation. “It used to be that guys like insurance auditors would come in and simply ask me if I had certain processes in place,” says Christopher Amos, IS manager at Centillium Communications. “Just answer yes and you’d get your big insurance discount. Now they want to see documented proof and in some cases verify that with hands-on testing.” Preparing for such audits puts a huge burden on IT.

“If you’ve implemented commonsense security, you’re probably already in compliance from an IT standpoint,” says Tim Keanini, CTO of nCircle, a security monitoring software maker. “Compliance from an auditing standpoint, however, is something else. Most regulations are fairly generic in terms of what they’re expecting from IT security. When the questions do get explicit, like some government audits such as SISMA [Streamlined Integrated Software Metrics Approach], nine out of 10 times they’re going to concern what and who is on your network. Getting to that information in an efficient manner is the real challenge.”

Trouble is, that’s a huge request for companies with sizable networks. Even for networks with a security infrastructure that provides event logs and identity management information, the process of gathering this data and distilling it so that it makes sense to business managers, auditors, and even lawyers is a daunting challenge.

Fresh tech to the rescue

Literally dozens of new products are springing up to ease IT administrators’ regulatory burdens. The general form that much of this software takes is that of a metasecurity management console. Using these new tools, IT security administrators can not only gather relevant data but also implement customized security policies on their networks. These policies ensure regulatory compliance from an IT standpoint and provide all the documentation necessary to prove that notion to anyone who might ask.

The Sentinel 5 product from eSecurity is an excellent example of this platform style. “We specifically designed Sentinel as a security management tool that sits on top of existing security infrastructure to manage these platforms cohesively, both with and without agents,” says Reed Harrison, CTO of eSecurity. Harrison describes Sentinel’s impact on compliance problems in terms of template-style Control Packs.