A SOC 2 system description outlines the boundaries of a SOC report. It contains pertinent details regarding the people, processes, and technology that support your product, software, or service. As a reminder, the SOC framework stands for System and Organization Controls. It is a broad architecture that organizations can use to audit the internal controls of vendors and business partners before entering a relationship with those firms, to assess whether those firms have a robust security posture.

Active Directory and AD Group Policy are foundational elements of any Microsoft Windows environment because of the critical role they play in account management, authentication, authorization, access management and operations. Accordingly, proper Active Directory auditing is essential for both cybersecurity and regulatory compliance.

We now live in an era where the security of all layers of the software stack is immensely important, and simply open-sourcing a code base is not enough to ensure that security vulnerabilities surface and are addressed. At Teleport, we see it as a necessity to engage a third party that specializes in acting as an adversary, and provide an independent analysis of our sources.

GCP audit logs are a powerful tool that track everything happening in your cloud infrastructure. By analyzing them, you can detect and react to threats. Modern cloud applications are not just virtual machines, containers, binaries, and data. When you migrated to the cloud, you accelerated the development of your apps and increased operational efficiency. But you also started using new assets in the cloud that need securing.

Audit logs are that thing that everyone has a good grasp about in theory, but is hard to define in practice. We have previously covered what is an audit log in IT context and now we’ll focus on why it’s important for security.

Microsoft 365 is a suite of cloud-based productivity and communication services that includes Microsoft Office applications (including OneNote and OneDrive) as well as other popular Microsoft tools like Skype and Teams. Microsoft 365 tools and services are at the core of many organizations’ data management and day-to-day workflows, so monitoring activity across your environment is key to making sure that these services remain secure and meet compliance standards.

In October, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) released its “2020 Staff Report Lessons Learned from Commission-Led CIP Reliability Audits.” The report summarizes the Commission’s observations from Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) audits performed in conjunction with staff from Regional Entities and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC).

Security configuration management (SCM) can help organizations do much more than just harden their attack surfaces against intrusions. This fundamental control also has the ability to make your audits flow more smoothly. Indeed, it allows organizations to pull reports from any point in time and demonstrate how their configuration changes and alignments help to support their compliance efforts.

IT compliance requirements are designed to help companies enhance their cybersecurity and integrate top-level protection into their workflows. But passing an IT security audit can be challenging. Complex requirements, constant changes in standards and laws, and audit processes, and a high number of required security procedures are the key challenges of maintaining compliance. The way out is with careful preparation and smart planning.