Co-authored by Gavin Littleboy
Challenges in Community Compliance
Authorities businesses face important challenges in sustaining community compliance as a result of 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 in opposition to vulnerabilities and threats. Compounding this concern are the restricted budgets and assets accessible inside authorities entities, which might make it tough to allocate ample personnel and instruments to handle compliance successfully. Moreover, the necessity to combine various applied sciences and legacy techniques additional complicates compliance efforts. These techniques typically lack the flexibleness wanted to adapt rapidly to new and evolving threats, making the duty of attaining and sustaining steady compliance an ongoing wrestle. Businesses are how automation and orchestration might help with these challenges.
Evolution of NetOps and SecOps Groups
The evolution of NetOps and SecOps groups is remodeling how authorities businesses method 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 essential community infrastructure. SecOps groups are continually responding to evolving threats resembling vulnerabilities created from configuration errors, uncared for updates, and never having ample 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 searching for in relation to community compliance? For networks, we’re validating end-of-life tools, code variations, CVE/PSIRTs (Frequent Vulnerabilities and Exposures/Product Safety Incident Response Groups), Safety Implementation guides resembling DoD STIG, and community and organizational requirements. As this checklist of compliance issues demonstrates, there are various touchpoints that rapidly make compliance a difficult activity and turns into a “firefight” state of affairs the place all assets are urgently centered to make amends 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 typically fall into 3 evaluation patterns: match configuration, match variables, or match enterprise logic.
Configuration matches search for precise matches in configuration. Examples embrace disabling or enabling of companies resembling 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 checklist is utilized to the proper interface and that it blocks organizational outlined protocols. This final sample is probably the most complicated to implement and varies extensively between organizations primarily based on the native implementation of the required coverage.
Right this moment, SecOps groups use their area particular auditing instruments to audit the community and create reviews. These reviews are then shared with the NetOps staff 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 resolve widespread targets 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 must fulfill not solely these compliance necessities, however community design necessities and different elements when making a last template to be utilized to the community.
Cisco Crosswork Community Companies 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 resolution that helps configuration administration, service orchestration, and network-wide coverage enforcement. Cisco NSO 6.x comes with important compliance updates resembling 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 might be validated primarily based on real-time community state and reported as much as northbound techniques. Cisco NSO can be model-driven, which means knowledge fashions and their intents can straight be translated to meant implementation state within the community. This allows 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 staff 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 completely different groups inside a corporation.
To be taught extra about Cisco Crosswork NSO or to see examples of methods to construct compliance templates, see beneath.
Compliance Reporting Examples Repository on NSO Developer GitHub
Closing Ideas
Because the roles inside NetOps and SecOps evolve, fostering a tradition of studying and flexibility 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 assets extra strategically and deal with their core missions. This not solely protects the company’s status but additionally ensures the uninterrupted supply of important companies.
To dive deeper into community compliance and automation, be part of us at Cisco Reside San Diego from June 8-12, 2025 for 2 insightful periods exploring methods and options to boost 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 need to be taught extra about how Cisco might help your compliance wants or to get began in your Automation Journey, attain out to your Account Group.
Extra Related Hyperlinks
Study extra about different Cisco options to assist authorities businesses with compliance
Cisco SaaS Compliant Product Availability
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