A joint effort of both the IT operations and security teams ultimately determines an enterprise’s security hardening strength. It is observed that the individual goals of these two groups are often misaligned, due to conflicting responsibilities. The result is what the industry analysts term it as the “SecOps gap,” wherein the poor collaboration between these two groups results into unhardened servers, system downtime, excessive labor costs and challenges in meeting the regulatory compliance requirements.
IT operations staffs are under intense pressure to support the enterprises. Business users demand highly available computing resources, and while the operations teams work to achieve the aggressive service level agreements, they are typically the ones also responsible for enforcing and maintaining the servers’ security baseline, defined by the security team. Hardening servers and ongoing policy changes may cause services downtime and reliability problems when unleashed into the production systems, due to interdependencies among business and IT systems. So, the operations teams perform extensive tests so as to ensure that a policy change/remediation in one area doesn’t cause downtime somewhere else.
CHS significantly reduces operational costs and eliminates service’s downtime by indicating the impact of a security baseline change directly on the production environments. An automated process simulates the impact of a change on a production environment, thus, saving the need of testing changes in a lab environment. Benefits:
