Compliance auditing: The first step to cyber security

Assuring that your company complies with industry standards is imperative. Being compliant not only heightens your reputation and allows you to trade in some industries, it also gives your clients confidence in your ability to secure their data. More importantly compliance helps to prevent security breaches and data theft.

Although compliance isn’t the complete solution to IT security, it can give you a basis on which to build a more involved and customised corporate security strategy to protect your company from cyber attacks that can be hugely damaging to your organization.

Paws Studio is a compliance auditing tool that enables organizations to produce thorough and easy to action compliance audit reports on their windows based workstation and servers. The tool includes pre-defined policies for top computer usage security policies as well as enabling you to customize the security policy to comply with your own security strategy.

Being fully scriptable means that Paws Studio can be written into your existing processes making the compliance process quicker and easier. You can choose whether to manually retrieve the data from your machines or use the remote network auditing function to fully automate the process.

Key features:

1. Perform compliance audits through either remote network auditing (beta phase) or manual access to the audit data for use in secure environments.

2. Produce clear, accessible and easy to action reports with comprehensive summaries to appeal to all levels of your organization.

3. Audit against pre-defined policies such as PCI, NSA, STIGS, SANS and NERC.

4. With access to all Paws Studio checks, define your own customized policy to audit against.

5. The tool is fully scriptable so Paws Studio audits can be written into your existing processes.

6. Export into PDF, CSV, XML and HTML.

7. Run multiple reports simultaneously.

Define your own security policy: Paws Studio has a definition editor with a built in easy to use “Simple View.’ This enables you to quickly edit your own definition files. The Editor gives you full access to all the Paws Studio checks so that you can that you can create thorough and customized definition files to base your audits against. There is also an “Advanced View’ if you wish to directly modify the generated XML.

Pre-defined policies: Compliance requirements may vary by industry. Paws Studio has several industry standard polices integrated into the software so that you can easily access all the requirements to become compliant.

Remote Network Auditing: With Paws Studio you can remotely collect the data that you wish to audit over the network. This function is currently still in the beta phase but we it will be upgraded shortly.

Manual data collection: Paws Studio also provides the option of manually collecting the data using the Paws Data Collector. This offers the benefit of creating no network traffic and is ideal for use in security environments where machines are isolated or locked down. The choice of manual or remote data collection means that Paws Studio always offers a failsafe, allowing you to complete your audits.

Author: Ian Whiting, CEO of Titania. Titania’s products are used in over 40 countries by government and military agencies, financial institutions, telecommunications companies, national infrastructure organizations and auditing companies, to help them secure critical systems.

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