MSSPs Helping Clients with Their Compliance Reporting Mandates.

An Executive Insight Newsletter from Shiv Singh, CISSP , CEO of LINEARSTACK .

As more clients extend their business into new regulated markets, the need to have accurate reporting for regulatory compliance is essential. Cyber insurance carriers, compliance regulators, and legal councils rely on compliance reports to make decisions that could adversely affect your business. Organisations leveraging a managed security service provider (MSSP) for monitoring, incident response, and system updating depend on these business partners to provide accurate and timely reports to help meet regulatory compliance requirements.?

Underestimating the Reporting Workflow Can Be Costly.??

Many cybersecurity architectures generate tremendous information yet lack comprehensive reporting capabilities. Syslog files, SNMP, and XDR telemetry are essential for organisations to find the source of the cyber-attacks and how effective the countermeasures were in preventing additional propagation. Reporting from these data sources helps organisations provide accurate historical timelines, root cause analysis, and legal artifacts. Organisations with a compliance mandate must submit reports, including uptime and downtime of the systems in question, known security breaches during a specific period, and customer or enterprise client data compromises.???

External and internal compliance auditors will soon challenge organisations using an out-of-date compliance reporting tool to improve the accuracy of their data. Failure to report actual information could affect the organisation in several ways:?

• Fines from Compliance and Governance Agency.??
• Investor Lawsuits for failure to meet regulatory compliance.?
• Damage to the organisation's brand and a lack of confidence by current customers and employees??

The Good and the Bad of Report Automation.?

Automation surrounding the compliance process, reporting practices, and policy compliance are everywhere within the enterprise environment. Automated payroll, content refresh across several public and internal websites, and security response capabilities interlock with internal audits, the need for efficient compliance monitoring, and adherence to policies.?

Compliance reporting process automation simplifies the ability to distribute the information to either a select group of recipients or a much broader audience. This workflow helps ensure the data, and they send the required distribution cadence to the correct groups.??

However, the challenge is that compliance officers, IT directors, and CISOs become inundated with so much information that these reports often need to be read more, even if the internal and external compliance programs mandate the material review. Many report automation systems will drop the content into a specific folder or public share drive to meet compliance standards.?

While report automation will ease most manual steps, having a small portion of the most critical reports generated by the user could promote more content readability and governance. If a user must log in on a specific date to access a report, this action becomes recorded in the compliance and governance system. The user may take a moment and read the information in that given moment to help the organisation show proof of compliance.??

MSSPs Essential Role in Reporting.?

?Organisations leveraging MSSP for managed security services also have a valuable partner to help with compliance reporting. MSSPs hired to monitor, detect, and respond to the client’s cyber-attack events have excellent visibility. Future U.S, EU, and Asia Pac cybersecurity compliance mandates require reporting of cyber-attack events within four days. MSSPs have become a strategic partner for organisations needing a revamp of their current reporting workflow.?

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