Compliance is not, nor has it ever been, security. Compliance is the spellcheck of the security world. Security is the work that people do every day to implement, enforce, and monitor the controls that protect systems, networks, applications, devices, users, and data. Compliance is the process of reviewing security work to ensure that it functions as intended.
Compliance is an important component of an organization’s security posture. Security implements technical controls while compliance provides business-level insights into how well they work. Security protects data while compliance offers external assurance for customers. As organizations seek to grow revenue, compliance and security become increasingly intertwined.
By dissecting the similarities and differences between compliance and security, organizations can align them more purposefully and gain their business value.
What Is Security?
Security is the process of safeguarding an organization’s digital assets and data against breaches, leaks, or cyber attacks. Organizations implement technical controls, processes, and tools to mitigate cyber threat risks, seeking to prevent malicious actors from gaining unauthorized access to data.
A security program typically revolves around:
- Data Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability: Only authorized users should be able to access and modify data, ensuring its availability at all times.
- Preventive Measures: Technical controls protect data during transit, while at rest, and across endpoints, like firewalls setting rules to allow inbound network traffic and identity access management (IAM) defining what resources users can access.
- Detection and Response: Security teams focus on identifying and rapidly responding to cybersecurity incidents to mitigate damage.
What Is Compliance?
Compliance means that an organization’s technical controls map to the best practices that laws, regulations, and industry standards organizations define. Organizations often need to follow security standards outlined in:
- Regulatory compliance requirements: agency rules that govern an industry or laws and define a series of fines or penalties for violations, like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX).
- Security standards and frameworks: best practices for implementing security risk mitigations, like National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication (SP) 800-53, Center for Internet Security (CIS) Controls, or NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF).
What Is The Difference Between Compliance and Security?
Where security focuses on implementing and enforcing technical controls, compliance focuses on monitoring their effectiveness. At a broader level, the two different in three distinct ways.
Objectives
Security and compliance exist for fundamentally different reasons and have different goals:
- Information security: Preventing unauthorized access to data and digital assets to mitigate cyber threat risk.
- Compliance: Demonstrating that security and data privacy practices meet legal obligations to build trust with stakeholders, customers, and partners.
A security-first approach to compliance helps align these objectives. By starting with a foundation of securing data, organizations then use compliance to document and double check their work.
Urgency
The different objectives create different roles for security and compliance within the organization. These roles have a different sense of urgency:
- Information security: Detecting and responding to security incidents effectively and efficiently.
- Compliance: Mapping controls to a framework that defines best practices and documenting that activities follow organizationally defined policies, like the incident response plan.
Since compliance requirements come from legal and bureaucratic processes, their best practices often lag behind the daily issues that security teams face.
Stakeholders
Despite their overlaps, compliance and security have different internal stakeholder who manage the programs:
- Information security: Technical teams and leadership, including the IT team, security team, Chief Information Officer (CIO), and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO).
- Compliance: Legal and business leadership who manage risk, including compliance officer, general counsel, and Chief Executive Officer (CEO).
For many organizations, translating the technical language of security into business risk, creating communication issues between the internal stakeholders that can undermine both compliance and security objectives.
Processes
The processes are the steps that the different functions follow. They each engage in specific activities:
- Information security: Defining technical controls, implementing technologies to support these controls, establishing IT environment baselines, detecting abnormal activity, and responding to alerts or incidents.
- Compliance: Understanding organizational risk, mapping technical controls to legal, regulatory, or industry standard requirements, writing policies and procedures, and documenting activities for audit purposes.
Often, these different processes overlap. Security teams define the control while compliance maps them to laws, regulations, or industry standards. Security teams implement technologies while the compliance team collects the reports generated to document ongoing security activities.
How Do Compliance and Security Complement Each Other?
Compliance documents the security program’s effectiveness, creating an intersection between the two. However, the two programs complement each other in multiple ways.
Program Validation
At the core, compliance is a way for organizations to gain third-party assurance over their security program. External auditors review the documentation that the organization provides and compares that information against the chosen compliance framework.
For example, the ISO 27000 series is an international standard that organizations can use to define event-based and asset-based risk scenarios. The security program sets the controls, like limiting user access according to the principle of least privilege. Meanwhile, the compliance program maps that to the ISO requirements and collects the documentation proving that the organization did, in fact, limit access appropriately and managed to identify any abnormal access.
As the auditors are independent third-party assessors, they have no vested interest in the outcome meaning that their assessment is unbiased. The audits that the compliance team organizes enable the organization to achieve certification that the security program protects information according to the established internal controls.
Customer Trust
Organizations use the program validation from compliance to build customer trust. To document their third-party risk management (TPRM) programs, customers increasingly ask vendors to supply audit documentation and respond to security questionnaires.
When organizations take a security-first approach, they build their compliance program around what they actually do. This approach enables them to build customer trust through transparency into how they protect data.
Future Revenue Plans
When organizations seek to scale their business operations by entering new markets, they often need to meet industry-specific compliance requirements. For example, an organization that wants to work with healthcare organizations, it will need to prove compliance with the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Availability Act (HIPAA).
Often, security frameworks require similar controls. For example, setting firewall rules to limit inbound and outbound traffic is a typical compliance requirement. When the organization’s compliance program starts on a foundation of security, the implemented controls often apply to multiple security frameworks, enabling it to move into new markets more easily.
Informed Budget Decisions
When organizations need to create their security budgets, they can use their compliance outcomes to help identify areas of improvement. For example, an organization’s security team may want to purchase a technology that responds to a new threat. When they correlate this need with compliance requirements, they can often prove the investment’s value to senior leadership.
Best Practices for Aligning Security and Compliance
When organizations align their security and compliance programs with their business objectives, they can multiply the value of both initiatives.
Centralize Security Data
Centralizing security data enables organizations to correlate events from across the IT environment for improved alerts and enhanced documentation for compliance purposes. By consolidating data into a single location, organizations can simplify their security monitoring and risk management processes, reducing operational costs.
Document All Security and Compliance Activities
As organizations mature their data protection and compliance programs, they consistently document their security activities. The compliance program’s policies and processes should relate to the actual activities as documented in the logs that the IT environment generates. When the two types of documentation support each other, the organization can prove that it has mitigated risk appropriately.
Continuously Monitor Controls’ Effectiveness
Continuous monitoring is critical to both security and compliance because it can identify anomalous behavior that can indicate a potential breach. If a data breach arises from a compliance violation, the organization could face potential legal liability. By continuously monitoring controls, the organization reduces data breach, compliance, and legal risk.
Identify and Track Key Performance Indicators
Organizations need to align their business objectives with their security and compliance programs. The key performance indicators (KPIs) for security and compliance should focus on mitigating business risk. For example, adopting cloud-based business applications may improve processes, but they can also come with security risks if they manage sensitive information and compliance requirements for protecting that data. The KPIs for both security and compliance then become business risk mitigation metrics.
Create Reporting Dashboards
Reporting dashboard aligns security and compliance by providing visualizations showing the organization’s current security posture. These graphics provide at-a-glance insight into potential issues for the security team. Meanwhile, they provide the high-level insights into risk that the compliance function and senior leadership need.
Graylog Security: Bridging the Gap Between Compliance and Security
Using Graylog Security, you can rapidly mature your TDIR capabilities without the complexity and cost of traditional Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) technology. Graylog Security’s Illuminate bundles include detection rulesets so that you have content, like Sigma detections, enabling you to uplevel your security alert, incident response, and threat hunting capabilities with correlations to ATT&CK tactic, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).
By leveraging our cloud-native capabilities and out-of-the-box content, you gain immediate value from your logs. Our anomaly detection ML improves over time without manual tuning, adapting rapidly to new data sets, organizational priorities, and custom use cases so that you can automate key user and entity access monitoring.
With our intuitive user interface, you can rapidly investigate alerts. Our lightning-fast search capabilities enable you to search terabytes of data in milliseconds, reducing dwell times and shrinking investigations by hours, days, and weeks.
To learn how Graylog Security can help you implement robust threat detection and response, contact us today.
