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Compliance

 

Organizations need to stay ahead of ever-evolving regulations, policies, and business risks while reducing time, errors, and costs with an analytics-driven, proactive approach to compliance. The correlation capabilities and content libraries included in Splunk Security Essentials and Splunk Enterprise Security let you access out-of-the-box insights into commonalities and anomalies, with a specific focus on security and compliance issues. These products help organizations move past reactive mode with:

  • Real-time collection, search, monitoring and analysis of data for compliance in a centralized solution
  • Fast report generation to meet collection and retention requirements for audit trails
  • Identification of organizational gaps against regulations such as HIPAA, PCI, SOX and GDPR using machine data
  • Automation of compliance tasks and mapping of customizable reports to compliance frameworks

What are the benefits of effective compliance? 

Typically an organization gains long-lasting benefits to be compliant with most regulations applicable to Government and Industry standards. Their risk and compliance posture benefits through:

  • Tracking events critical to the business. Stay ahead of compliance mandates with an analytics-driven approach to identifying risk and addressing gaps before they are called out.
  • Evaluating the risk of data breach event for any of your processes. Quickly gain real-time risk posture and insights across all IT resources and security controls to measure compliance against common frameworks.
  • Defining which events are considered the highest threats. Gain a real-time picture of the state of risk and deliver actionable alerts when compliance posture changes.
  • Keeping records of security events. Track what happened, the exact timing, and how was it handled. Pass audits with minimal effort, regardless of mandate or regulatory framework.

What are compliance best practices?

Many customers have concerns over sensitive data being breached and resulting in the failure of compliance standards. Scenarios such as transmitting user credentials or credit card numbers across network environments that have tighter restrictions on data handling creates risk for the business. Often, sensitive information can make its way into log events without the business knowing and these logs get sent, which in turn exposes the information.

Splunk Security Essentials, Splunk Enterprise Security, and Splunk SOAR users have a variety of compliance-based content and playbooks no matter where they are in their customer journey. Utilizing analytics-driven content collections as a foundation to compliance helps businesses gain confidence that they are meeting compliance requirements, are able to protect their most sensitive data, and can establish repeatable proof they are doing so.

Common compliance frameworks

Some of the most common security compliance frameworks are:

GDPR concerns all organizations that process personal data, with fines up to 20 million Euro, or 4 percent of the company turnover (whichever is higher). GDPR compliance covers a wide range of data security issues, including data protection, accountability, data processing, consent from subjects, and privacy. 

The capabilities you'll need to ensure compliance with this framework are:

  • Detecting malware
  • Detecting brute force behavior
  • Detecting and auditing geographic user authentications

PCI-DSS concerns financial organizations, with fines between $5,000 and $100,000 per month. Compliance is required by the contract for those handling and processing cardholder data. Whether you are a start-up or a global financial enterprise your business must always be compliant, and your compliance must be validated annually.

The capabilities you'll need to ensure compliance with this framework are:

  • Detecting credit card numbers
  • Detecting data exfiltration
  • Detecting account takeover

HIPAA concerns healthcare organizations, with fines ranging from $100 to $50,000 per violation, with a maximum penalty of $1.5 million annually. Compliance covers standards for protected health information (PHI), and the HIPAA Security Rule established the national standards for electronic protected health information (e-PHI).

The capabilities you'll need to ensure compliance with this framework are:

  • Ensuring connections are encrypted
  • Detecting PII and PHI

NIST 800-53 concerns federal agencies and contractors. This critical standard provides a set of guidelines designed to make it easier for federal agencies and contractors to meet the requirements imposed by the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA).

The capabilities you'll need to ensure compliance with this framework are:

  • Detecting anomalous account changes
  • Detecting and auditing geographic user authentications

How does Splunk for Security help with compliance? 

Splunk compliance apps make it easier to meet audit requirements by providing visualizations across frameworks and controls, helping you to take action and respond more effectively.

With Compliance Essentials, you can start leveraging machine data logs and configurations to help with validation and attestation to:

  • CMMC version 1.0
  • NIST SP 800-53
  • Revision 5 for RMF
  • FISMA
  • NIST SP 800-171
  • Revision 2 for DFARS

With the Splunk App for PCI Compliance, you can review and measure the effectiveness and status of PCI compliance technical controls in real time. You can also identify and prioritize any control areas that may need to be addressed.

Each control comes with guidance and customizations to meet your organization's particular needs, as well as future use cases. There are options to align to domains or practices, and multiple ways to export the content and visualization. Panels and dashboards help identify trends and activity beyond audit documentation needs. Actions are included in the audit trail and can be reviewed and measured for effectiveness.

Watch the following video to learn more. 

What compliance processes can I put in place?