If your organisation deals with large amounts of data, particularly personal information, adhering to compliance regulations is critical to maintaining customer trust, building reputation, and avoiding litigation and heavy fines.
However, achieving compliance can seem a complex challenge for many – look at Amazon or Facebook, which recently had to pay fines for failures totalling over $ 1 billion.
For organisations that struggle, the issue may be partly due to external pressures such as ever-changing regulatory goalposts, daunting privacy and security laws such as the GDPR, and internal cultures often lacking effective monitoring and assurance systems and capabilities.
Vulnerability scanning, an essential part of any comprehensive IT infrastructure security strategy, can offer an effective solution and help to meet compliance requirements. In this article, we discover how it does this and why it may be a game changer for you and your organisation.
The challenging landscape of compliance
Designed to protect sensitive data, prevent fraud, and ensure businesses are accountable and meet certain standards, compliance regulations are critical.
They need clarification because the regulations organisations adhere to are very much based on the industry they are in, where they are located, and what type of data they are handling. One factor remains consistent: any organisation dealing in data is responsible for complying and demonstrating compliance.
By identifying vulnerabilities and weaknesses in an organisation’s system and across its applications, vulnerability scanning is a cost-effective and robust way to address many requirements and ensure responsibilities are met.
For example, if your organisation needs to comply with either the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) or General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it can help by identifying, prioritising, and addressing potential vulnerabilities or weaknesses in the systems and applications that store your critical data, whilst also providing clear and insightful documentation and reporting.
Benefits of Managed Vulnerability Scanning for Compliance
Regarding vulnerability scanning, you have the traditional and the more recent outsourced managed approach. This brings many advantages to your overall security posture, improving your compliance.
Proactive approach to cybersecurity: Managed vulnerability scanning allows organisations to use specialist experts from their chosen Managed Service Provider (MSP) to identify, prioritise, and prevent risk and vulnerabilities before they can be exploited by cybercriminals or threat actors, providing real-time updates and customised reports that allow immediate remediation to take place based on the threat level and prevent a breach from occurring.
Cost-effective: This solution allows rapid, regular, and automated system and network testing, meaning there is no need to implement in-house manual scanning, which can often take considerable time, expertise, and money. It also allows you to scale up or down your scanning efforts depending on the size of your organisation, in turn allowing you to manage your resources better.
Enhanced compliance: Many regulatory standards, such as the PCI DSS and Article 32 of the GDPR, require organisations to utilise vulnerability scanning to ensure compliance and prevent a data breach caused by exploiting a vulnerability.
Builds greater reputation and trust: If your customers see you are taking a proactive approach to keeping their information safe and protected, they will have far greater trust in you as an organisation. This, and the adherence to regulatory standards and the avoidance of fines and negatively publicised data breaches, ensure your reputation remains intact.
Meet your compliance responsibilities with Managed Vulnerability Scanning
As demonstrated, Managed Vulnerability Scanning is a critical component of any robust and comprehensive cybersecurity strategy that should not be ignored.
With ever more frequent and sophisticated attacks occurring, help your organisation to reduce and prevent the risk of data breaches and ensure compliance, trust, and peace of mind.
Discover more about Brightsolid’s professional Managed Vulnerability Scanning Service today and take that first step by filling in a form or making a call.