Automating routine tasks saves costs and increases operational efficiency. Automatically logging PTO and tracking expense reports instead of filling out time sheets and reimbursement requests are examples, but automation isn’t just for HR or accounting. Many companies automated their compliance processes and procedures.
For example, instead of manually tracking software licenses in a spreadsheet, IT can use a tool to automatically monitor where the software is installed, flag unauthorized use, and create a centralized report that’s audit-ready.
Companies also use automated compliance solutions to handle security and compliance tasks, like enforcing strong passwords and encrypting hard drives. Not only does automated security compliance keep endpoints secure with minimal intervention from IT, it ensures the organization complies with legal and regulatory requirements without adding manual work to the team.
What Is Compliance Automation?
Compliance automation is when a company uses technology to automate predictable compliance procedures and tasks, reducing the manual work it takes to comply with industry standards or regulatory frameworks.
For example, your company likely has local and federal labor regulations it must comply with. Let’s say one of these regulations is that you must track employee work hours and meal breaks. In a company that hasn’t automated this task, time is tracked manually. An employee may fill out a time sheet, send it to HR, and someone in HR enters the data in a spreadsheet that’s maintained in case the government ever audits the company. The company complies with the regulation, but it’s a time-consuming and laborious process.
Compliance automation speeds things up. Employees may enter their work hours online or have their time tracked using swipes on a clock. Their work hours and breaks are tracked and logged automatically, and saved in a centralized system that’s easy to access without manual effort, and the company complies with the regulations.
What Is Automated Security Compliance?
Automated security compliance is, in some ways, a sub-specialty of compliance automation. Like automated compliance, routine security tasks are automated, reducing the manual tasks IT needs to do to ensure the company is in regulatory compliance.
Let’s say a company uses Windows laptops and is subject to HIPAA regulations, so it has to follow strict rules around access controls (like using strong passwords). Without automation, the IT team may have to manually check every password to ensure it’s strong, send reminder emails to everyone that they need to update their passwords, and grab and save screenshots to prove everyone is in compliance.
Automated security compliance removes most of the manual work. A compliance automation software can automatically enforce the password policy and lock someone out of the system until the password is changed. Likewise, it can automatically generate reports showing who has compliant passwords and who doesn’t, then send reminder emails to anyone who needs to update their password. The system can also notify IT when everyone is in compliance and provide proof during an audit.
Why Security Compliance Matters
There are two types of security your company may need to comply with: frameworks and regulatory standards. While you can automate compliance processes for both, understanding the difference will guide what compliance automation software you choose and how you configure it.
Security frameworks help your company align with external security standards for your industry. These are generally voluntary and outline a structured set of guidelines and best practices around cybersecurity. For example, Service Organization Control 2 (SOC 2) is a voluntary set of guidelines for managing customer data. No law says any organization must meet SOC 2, but many follow the guidelines because it proves the company is committed to secure data handling.
Regulatory standards are the legal or industry-mandated security rules. If you’re in healthcare, you’re likely subject to HIPAA guidelines for protecting data, preventing breaches, who accesses sensitive data, and so on. In this case, you’re required to meet HIPAA security compliance standards.
In both instances, making sure your company meets or exceeds every aspect of the framework or regulatory standard can be tedious, but automated security compliance processes simplify and strengthen your security compliance posture.
How Security Compliance Automation Works
Though the process varies from tool to tool, here’s how security compliance automation tools generally work.
Baseline Assessment
The software runs a baseline check on your entire system and compares your current configurations against your frameworks or regulations. Then it tells you what’s missing and where your system is out of compliance.
Policy Enforcement
Once you’ve made the right compliance efforts, you can set the system to enforce compliance controls, like requiring strong passwords or locking a user out after a certain amount of idle time. You can also restrict usage or block access for noncompliant systems until they are updated.
Real-Time Visibility
The tool is “always on,” continuously monitoring for compliance drift, flagging systems and endpoints that don’t meet current compliance requirements. It flags changes that violate policies, logs incidents, and sends alerts to IT for further investigation.
Ongoing Protection
Automated remediation, evidence collection, and audit reporting ensure every device stays compliant and creates a paper trail for outside and internal auditing.
Benefits of Automating Security Compliance
Automated compliance solutions offer qualitative and quantitative benefits. For example, it ensures your company remains compliant with security standards, reducing the chances of being fined for compliance violations while protecting your system from hacks and breaches.
Continuous Compliance
Manual security compliance processes are cumbersome, so they don’t happen often. There may be spot audits, quarterly checks, and annual reviews, but that only tells you if your systems are in compliance at that moment.
Automated security compliance is continuous, ensuring that every endpoint and system on the network complies. Real-time monitoring instantly tells you when something drifts out of compliance, and continuous monitoring and enforcement of security polices strengthens your security posture.
Speed and Scale
Even when a manual compliance process uncovers an issue, it may take time to remediate it, especially when multiple endpoints are out of compliance.
Compliance automation speeds the remediation process, shortening the time between identification and repair. Automated systems can flag risky or out-of-compliant configurations and fix them quickly, while automated notifications can escalate more sensitive matters to IT. What’s more, automated compliance systems can handle these tasks at scale, ensuring every device is protected.
Evidence Collection
Compliance automation also makes evidence collection easier, creating a paper trail that proves you’re in compliance during an audit. For example, automated systems can log the details of every endpoint and demonstrate that they all meet current encryption standards.
Keeps You Up-to-Date
Finally, automating security compliance ensures you comply when existing standards change. For example, cybersecurity rules for HIPAA are updated periodically. Most vendors track these updates and push the changes to your platform so you’re aware of the change and can update your settings and policies accordingly.
What’s more, when your organization is subject to multiple compliance standards or regulations, an automated system can ensure you’re complying with all of them.
Security Compliance Automation Challenges
Though security compliance automation helps your IT department work quickly and efficiently, automation comes with challenges.
False Sense of Security
One of the biggest challenges of automated compliance management is that it can lead to a false sense of security. Compliance automation tools can perform most security compliance tasks, but they aren’t foolproof. Without human intervention and oversight, a misconfigured tool could miss security or compliance gaps or be good at enforcing control but not verifying how effective its efforts are.
Tool Sprawl and Fatigue
In some respects, adding an automated tool is “another dashboard" the team has to monitor and keep track of, especially when your organization already has tools in place for security, endpoint management, monitoring, and reporting. The number of alerts and notifications could lead to overwhelm or fatigue, and serious notices may be overlooked.
Limited Coverage
If you use “standard” systems like Windows or macOS, most compliance automation tools will work just fine. But if your company uses custom-built software or apps, legacy infrastructure, or has unique internal workflows, an automated compliance tool may not be able to check your system for compliance.
Employee Concerns
Finally, automated enforcement can create friction with employees. They may feel you’re tracking their usage or trying to limit what they can do with their device. Certain security compliance procedures, like forced password resets and blocking unpatched devices, may frustrate them or make them feel like IT is trying to make it hard for them to do their jobs.
Best Practices for Security Compliance Automation
Automating security tasks isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it process. Standards change, people leave for new roles, and without human intervention and oversight, you risk making your security processes more complicated.
Low-Risk Tasks
“Easy” tasks are often the best candidates for security compliance automation, so anything that’s routine or doesn’t require human intervention. For example, automated evidence collection, configuration checks, and reporting are all tasks you can automate.
Low-Risk Remediation
Along those same lines, remediation for low-risk issues can be automated. In addition to updating a device that doesn’t meet the current configuration guidelines, compliance automation software can turn disabled antivirus protection back on, install missing patches or updates, and reset noncompliant configurations.
Automate Wisely
Certain tasks shouldn't be automated, like anything that deals with sensitive or confidential information, and anything that might be context-dependent or not clear-cut. These are best left to a human.
For example, if someone needs temporary admin access to a Windows machine to install a driver, they can make a lot of changes to the system, like disabling the firewall or creating a backdoor. Automating the access approval process could mean no one monitors what happens during the installation or ensures access is revoked.
Keep Humans Involved
Along those same lines, keeping humans involved in security compliance procedures ensures someone can review one-off exceptions and handle sensitive situations.
Using the above example, requiring a human to approve the temporary admin access makes it more likely the access and changes are tracked, monitored, and revoked when the job is done. Similarly, if there’s a problem with an endpoint that HR uses, it may make more sense to have someone from IT review the situation instead of leaving it in the hands of an automated process to ensure sensitive data is handled carefully.
Adaptiva Makes Security and Compliance Automation Easy
Adaptiva’s suite of products makes it easy for organizations to automate their security and compliance processes. OneSite Health monitors every endpoint on the network, remediating out-of-compliance systems immediately, while OneSite Patch rapidly and autonomously deploys patches. Contact us today and request a demo to learn how Adaptiva can help you automate endpoint remediation.
