Regulations and Compliance

Maintaining compliance with business and government regulations has never been easy. Systems drift after they are deployed, confounding the auditors, and piling on the man-hours. Until recently, there was no way to prove "everything's OK" on a system. Those days are over, thanks to SignaCert's Enterprise Trust Server (ETS), which provides automated, device-independent system validation based on your gold images and manufacturers standards. With ETS you can quickly and easily prove that your production system is "deployed as intended," enabling you to meet the demands of many regulations and stay in compliance.

• Verify information and platform integrity: With SignaCert, you can prove systems are deployed as intended and validate elements as authentic (SOX, FISMA, PCI, etc.)
• Protect data and manage vulnerabilities: ETS measures and affirms configuration parameters for the entire system, including discrete system and device elements, and tracks changes (HIPPA, PCI, STIGs, etc.)
• Monitor, Measure, and Test: ETS provides ongoing lifecycle monitoring and system validation (with audit) (PCI, FISMA, SOX, etc.)

Why IT controls are important to regulations and compliance
IT controls, especially independent controls, improve regulatory compliance objectives, in addition IT controls can be used to measure and improving the organization's operational excellence. IT controls also help organizations quickly adapt to changing regulatory compliance requirements.

Regulatory environment complexity is unavoidable
As the number and breadth of regulations grows, the regulatory environment becomes increasingly complex. This, in turn, increases organizations’ and managers’ responsibility for managing the regulations’ demands and providing accurate evidence of compliance.
Solutions like SignaCert can help by providing the verification essential to many regulations.

Complexity in achieving and maintaining compliance IS avoidable
Many companies are finding that compliance efforts are more complex, time-consuming, and costly than originally anticipated. The challenge is to maintain compliance in a cost-effective, efficient manner, which can be hindered when compliance efforts are dispersed. Holistic solutions like SignaCert can cut through across lines of responsibility that limit your organization's ability improve compliance efficiency, and can greatly decrease duplicated efforts.

Noncompliance is never an option
The threat of legal consequences for not complying is the primary motivation behind managing regulatory compliance effectively and proactively. These consequences can extend beyond financial, civil, or criminal penalties to affect the organization’s reputation in the market and its ability to thrive. Ironically, companies may make every effort to comply and still face these consequences because there is no adequate solution for “proving” a regulatory requirement.

The quality of compliance efforts matters
IT auditors greatly prefer automated IT controls. Automated controls can evaluate quickly and reliably, and can reduce the time, expense, and disruption audits. Automated controls are also generally less expensive in the long term than manual controls. SignaCert’s IT Controls, improve regulatory compliance accuracy and attestation.

Who is concerned with compliance
As if maintaining the systems weren’t enough, these days, IT managers must also ensure that appropriate safeguards and controls maintain privacy, security, and reliability for their organizations, in order to meet the mandates of various regulatory requirements. The involvement in compliance varies by function.

• Chief Information Officers (CIOs) concerned with the deployment and operation of systems and IT-related processes
• Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) who oversee overall information security and compliance with information security policies
• Technical Decision Makers who select technology solutions to solve business problems
• IT Operations Managers running the systems and processes that execute regulatory compliance processes
• IT Security Architects designing IT control and security systems
• IT Infrastructure Architects supporting the systems that IT Security Architects design
• Risk/Compliance Officers who must meet compliance regulations and standards
• IT Audit Managers concerned with reducing the workload of internal and external IT auditors

IT Integration and ROI
IT management often ends up implementing the IT controls that the regulations “strongly suggest.” As IT and business management to work closely together to tackle regulatory compliance, IT managers can further integrate themselves into their organizations and become more trusted partners with management. They can then use this trust to influence management to develop other IT initiatives can increase efficiency cut costs.