Information is key to any compliance operation, so it stands to reason that you can’t have 100% compliance without being 100% informed. But what does it mean to be 100% informed? The answer is more complicated than you might think, requiring organizations to stay up to date on all regulations and threats that impact operations, as well as the inner workings of the operation itself.
Let’s examine how staying 100% informed across all these realms is a necessary step toward being 100% compliant– and how most organizations need a seasoned MSP partner to achieve this in today’s modern environment of tough regulations and growing cyber threats affecting increasingly complex IT systems.
What it Means to be 100% Informed
The best way to conceptualize being “100% informed” is as a matrix of information sources, dynamically analyzed and contextualized for an organization to connect insights to action. It’s when your knowledge of multiple threat feeds, deep familiarity of all compliance regulations and complete visibility into enterprise systems allows you to zoom in and out – continually assessing larger risk factors and threat patterns, and then pinpointing how your operation may be affected so you can close vulnerability gaps and harden systems.
This mastery over multiple information sources allows you to effortlessly have visibility of both the big picture and the granular picture, both within and outside the organization. And being 100% informed on all these fronts is what allows you to craft the optimal compliance operation.
For example, knowing the detailed nature of a threat, exactly how it is targeting your systems and the precise compliance guardrails that may be impacted can help you deploy a proactive and highly targeted response that protects the organization without slowing down operations or missing any vulnerabilities. This is how dynamic and real-time insights can continually support the proactive risk management and system optimization efforts required to achieve 100% compliance.
Leveraging an MSP Partner to Connect Insights to Action
When organizations understand how being 100% informed can drive 100% compliance, they soon realize they need a partner to help achieve this. To illustrate, let’s explore how an MSP can help with the three essential knowledge areas key to understanding your own systems, knowing the regulatory landscape and grasping the cyber threats most critical to your operation. To begin, an MSP can help you stay 100% informed about your IT operations by deploying powerful discovery, vulnerability scanning and other visibility tools that most companies don’t have and can’t afford to invest in on their own.
It’s a similar story when it comes to regulations. The compliance landscape is always changing, including major updates to SEC rules and a constantly shifting tapestry of international regulations. Staying on top of all these changes is a full-time job – something an experienced MSP can do, especially if the MSP partner specializes in both the general cybersecurity, data privacy and related rules that any company must follow, as well as the highly-specific financial regulations a bank, brokerage or other financial firm is subject to.
The right MSP partnership also pays off when it comes to threat intelligence. For instance, ECI is the only MSP of its kind with a subscription to the highly-specialized Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) feed. As the sole global cyber intelligence sharing community focused exclusively on financial services, FS-ISAC frequently identifies attack vectors that broader threat feeds miss. Furthermore, ECI combines these alerts with our own research across our client base to parse the latest threats and how they affect our customers – allowing us to extend proactive, highly-specific protections to each of our client companies.
Throughout, an MSP partner can leverage automation as a key enabler to being 100% informed. That’s because keeping track of multiple information sources around threats and regulations, and then mapping how they impact all your enterprise systems is nearly impossible to do manually. An experienced MSP partner can deploy automated vulnerability scanning, endpoint protection, SOC protocols and other steps to provide comprehensive, customized protection at scale. The end result is a 100% informed cybersecurity posture as the foundation for achieving 100% compliance.
