What is continuous control monitoring?
Continuous control monitoring (CCM) is defined as using a set of technologies to reduce company losses through continuous monitoring. It also reduces the cost of audits via the continuous auditing of controls in financial applications and other types of applications.
In the overall business ecosystem, CCM sits above your existing security tooling, ensuring that all assets are protected, and all controls are fully operational. Continuous control monitoring not only gives you full visibility over all of your assets, but also applications, users, and databases, and gives you confidence that the controls are functioning correctly. This provides security teams with a trusted overview across business lines, regions, and platforms.
How does continuous control monitoring work?
Continuous control monitoring automatically consumes data from sources across your security, business, and IT domains. By providing a unified view of your data, CCM can identify unmanaged or previously unknown assets and continuously control coverage gaps in real-time. The process then substantiates and supports that insight through automated reports. These reports can be segmented according to business unit, market or service line and mapped to your structure and goals, providing context for your organisation’s security metrics.
Why is CCM important?
Continuous control monitoring gives businesses the visibility they need to identify vulnerabilities and attacks. They provide real-time views to help IT professionals respond proactively and quickly to compromise and threats. CCM gives companies complete end-to-end visibility to identify security vulnerabilities or misconfigurations and helps them align their cybersecurity posture with industry frameworks, standards, and regulations.
Make continuous control monitoring an essential part of your business
Making CCM an essential part of your business is key to ensuring cybersecurity is monitored and improved upon in real-time. Here are a number of reasons why controls can be ineffective:
- Not fully deployed when purchased.
- Incorrect or incomplete configuration or implementation.
- Organisation or user failed to install a patch or an update.
- Problems with licensing, authorisations, or the network.
Continuous controls monitoring measures and monitors your controls coverage against trusted inventories to fill the gaps. CCM automatically and effortlessly cross-references the performance of controls against multiple security frameworks and internal SLAs.
The benefits of continuous controls monitoring
CCM adds significant value to any organisation. Not only can it help bolster cybersecurity measures, but can improve risk management, compliance and enhance the ability to achieve organisational goals. Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of CCM and what continuous monitoring can do for your business:
- Increases company value to investors and stakeholders.
- Increases value through improved privacy controls and security.
- Detects vulnerabilities in real-time to enable fast responses.
- Accelerates reporting to allow speedy decision-making and business improvement.
- Eliminates and/or reduces ongoing compliance costs.
- Allows automated detective controls to supersede manual controls.
- Brings down costs and establishes a more automated, risk-based control environment. According to 2021 Data Breach Report by IBM, automation in cybersecurity provides the biggest cost mitigation, up to $3.81 million.
CCM should not be viewed as short-term solution, but as a long-term systematic approach to securing your business. The benefits of continuous monitoring should never be underestimated. Not only is it a proven and effective method of helping to secure your data and sensitive information, but also key to business success in today’s digital age.
Taking CCM step-by-step
All of your existing tools must be integrated as a first step to automatically collect, normalise, and model controls data and assets across the entire organisation. This collected data helps build accurate inventories that enhance the configuration management database (CMDB) and identify missing controls. Security teams are then able to analyse whether the controls are operating within internal SLAs and whether they are adhering to standards such as CIS, NIST, or PCI. With these steps in place, it is possible to continuously measure and monitor risks and controls, allowing organisations to substantiate regulatory compliance across its entire ecosystem.
Continuous controls monitoring from RiskXchange
A CCM managed platform allows you to see and understand your security and risk posture in real-time. The platform provides you with full controls visibility, along with automated, continuous monitoring of your security controls and compliance.
Not only does continuous control monitoring provide real-time visibility into a company’s security posture, but also the overall security status of your organisation’s software and hardware, networks, services, and information. It also covers cybersecurity monitoring best practices, security misconfigurations and any other vulnerabilities that may occur.
Let’s take a closer look at what RiskXchange provides:
- Long-term CCM platform management.
- CCM expertise around the clock.
- A powerful AI-assisted, automated and centralised 360-degree cybersecurity risk rating management approach.
- A continuous process to identify the four stages of service delivery: identify, automate, monitor, and improve.
- Monitors controls to ensure they remain accurate and effective.
- Ensures alignment of cybersecurity posture with industry frameworks, standards, and regulations.
- Ensures your organisation is able to maximise the value of its security investments, identify coverage gaps, improve security, and reduce risk.
Get in touch with RiskXchange to find out more about the importance of continuous control monitoring.