Co-authored by Gavin Littleboy
Challenges in Community Compliance
Authorities businesses face important challenges in sustaining community compliance because of the ever-increasing complexity of laws. 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 towards vulnerabilities and threats. Compounding this subject are the restricted budgets and sources accessible inside authorities entities, which might make it troublesome to allocate ample personnel and instruments to handle compliance successfully. Moreover, the necessity to combine various applied sciences and legacy programs additional complicates compliance efforts. These programs usually lack the pliability wanted to adapt shortly to new and evolving threats, making the duty of attaining and sustaining steady compliance an ongoing battle. Businesses are taking a look at how automation and orchestration may help with these challenges.
Evolution of NetOps and SecOps Groups
The evolution of NetOps and SecOps groups is remodeling how authorities businesses 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 deal with shared challenges. NetOps groups want to deploy steady community automation and validation to simplify operations, enhance pace and effectivity to ship companies, and enhance efficiency and resiliency of important community infrastructure. SecOps groups are continuously responding to evolving threats reminiscent of vulnerabilities created from configuration errors, uncared for updates, and never having enough 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 on the lookout for in the case of 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 reminiscent of DoD STIG, and community and organizational requirements. As this record of compliance concerns demonstrates, there are a lot of touchpoints that shortly make compliance a difficult process and turns into a “firefight” state of affairs the place all sources are urgently centered to atone for compliance earlier than the following 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 usually fall into 3 evaluation patterns: match configuration, match variables, or match enterprise logic.
Configuration matches search for actual matches in configuration. Examples embrace disabling or enabling of companies reminiscent of http or password-encryption. Variable matches search for partial or variable substitution matches in configuration. Examples embrace 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 embrace validating {that a} boundary entry management record is utilized to the right interface and that it blocks organizational outlined protocols. This final sample is essentially the most complicated to implement and varies broadly between organizations primarily based on the native implementation of the required coverage.
In the present day, SecOps groups use their area particular auditing instruments to audit the community and create reviews. These reviews are then shared with the NetOps crew 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 objectives 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 components when making a closing template to be utilized to the community.
Cisco Crosswork Community Providers Orchestrator (NSO) offers 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 answer that helps configuration administration, service orchestration, and network-wide coverage enforcement. Cisco NSO 6.x comes with important compliance updates reminiscent of compliance templates, an intuitive compliance reporting interface, and continues to introduce options to cowl the patterns above. Cisco NSO has trendy 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 programs. Cisco NSO can be model-driven, that means knowledge fashions and their intents can instantly 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 crew have outlined for the community for remediation. With Cisco NSO, groups can guarantee constant compliance throughout multi-vendor community parts, 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 the best way to construct compliance templates, see beneath.
Crosswork NSO Resolution Overview
Compliance Reporting Examples Repository on NSO Developer GitHub
Closing Ideas
Because the roles inside NetOps and SecOps evolve, fostering a tradition of studying and adaptableness ensures that personnel can successfully handle new applied sciences and regulatory necessities. By constructing cross-functional experience and problem-solving capabilities, businesses can deal with present compliance wants and anticipate future calls for, resulting in extra resilient and responsive operations. Reaching efficient compliance options and leveraging automation yields substantial returns on funding (ROI) for presidency businesses, leading to notable price financial savings and enabling businesses to allocate sources extra strategically and deal with their core missions. This not solely protects the company’s popularity but additionally ensures the uninterrupted supply of important companies.
To dive deeper into community compliance and automation, be part of us at Cisco Dwell San Diego from June 8-12, 2025 for 2 insightful periods 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 want to be taught extra about how Cisco may help your compliance wants or to get began in your Automation Journey, attain out to your Account Group.
Extra Related Hyperlinks
Be taught extra about different Cisco options to assist authorities businesses with compliance
Cisco SaaS Compliant Product Availability
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