Network Compliance Management

Motadata's Network Compliance Management feature helps you maintain and enforce network policies with ease. By automating compliance checks and monitoring, our tool ensures your network adheres to regulatory standards and internal policies. This not only enhances security but also reduces the risk of non-compliance, allowing you to focus on strategic initiatives while maintaining a secure and compliant network environment.

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The Motadata AIOps Compliance Module offers a robust and automated solution for managing compliance-related audits and assessments of your Network Configuration Management (NCM)-managed devices. This module is designed to alleviate the challenges organizations face in adhering to an ever-growing landscape of industry regulations and security standards.

Organizations across all sectors are increasingly required to demonstrate compliance with standards such as the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmarks, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), HIPAA, PCI DSS, and others. Manually verifying device configurations against these standards is a time-consuming, resource-intensive, and error-prone process. It often involves:

  • Scouring through device configuration files.
  • Executing numerous CLI commands.
  • Manually comparing the output with compliance requirements.
  • Generating reports and documentation.

Motadata AIOps addresses these challenges by automating the configuration assessment process. This automation significantly reduces the manual effort and complexity involved in compliance audits, enabling organizations to:

  • Streamline their compliance efforts.
  • Ensure consistent adherence to best practices.
  • Minimize the risk of non-compliance and associated penalties.
  • Improve overall security posture.
  • Reduce audit preparation time and costs.

For example, consider an organization applying for CIS or GDPR compliance. Motadata AIOps can automate the process of verifying that network devices are configured according to the specific security guidelines outlined in these standards. This includes checking settings related to:

  • Password policies
  • Access control lists
  • Logging and auditing
  • System hardening
  • Data protection measures

By automating these checks, Motadata AIOps enables the organization to efficiently demonstrate compliance and maintain a strong security posture.

Key Features

Motadata AIOps provides a comprehensive suite of features to simplify and automate network compliance management:

  • Compliance Settings Screen: The Compliance Settings screen serves as the central management console for all compliance-related activities within Motadata AIOps. From this intuitive interface, users can:
  • Define Compliance Rules: Create and customize rules that specify the desired configuration state of network devices. These rules serve as the foundation for compliance assessments, defining what constitutes a compliant or non-compliant configuration.
  • Organize Rules into Rule Groups: Group related rules together for better organization, management, and reporting. This allows for logical categorization of compliance requirements (e.g., by device type, security domain, or regulatory standard).
  • Run Audits: Initiate on-demand or scheduled audits to assess device configurations against defined compliance rules. The system automatically checks device configurations and identifies any deviations from the specified requirements.
  • Set up Automated Remediation Actions: Configure automated actions to automatically correct non-compliant configurations. This feature can significantly reduce the time and effort required to remediate compliance violations, ensuring that devices are brought back into compliance quickly and efficiently.

Automated Configuration Assessments: Motadata AIOps automates the process of assessing the configurations of registered devices against defined compliance rules. This eliminates the need for manual checks, which are time-consuming, error-prone, and difficult to scale. By automating this process, Motadata AIOps ensures that:

  • All devices are regularly evaluated for compliance.
  • Compliance checks are performed consistently and accurately.
  • Potential compliance violations are identified promptly.
  • The risk of human error is minimized.

Detailed Report Generation: The module generates comprehensive and detailed reports that provide a clear overview of the compliance status of network devices. These reports are essential for:

  • Demonstrating compliance to auditors and regulatory bodies.
  • Tracking compliance trends over time.
  • Identifying areas where compliance needs improvement.
  • Providing evidence of due diligence and adherence to best practices.

Reports typically include information on:

  • The devices that were assessed.
  • The rules that were checked.
  • The compliance status of each device for each rule.
  • Any identified non-compliance issues.
  • Remediation actions taken (if any).

Out-of-the-box (OOTB) Rules: Motadata AIOps provides a library of pre-built, out-of-the-box (OOTB) rules for the CIS (Center for Internet Security) Benchmarks. CIS Benchmarks are a widely recognized and respected set of security configuration guidelines for various operating systems, software, and network devices. These OOTB rules enable users to:

  • Quickly assess their devices against industry best practices.
  • Reduce the effort required to define compliance rules from scratch.
  • Ensure that their configurations align with established security standards.

Custom Rule Creation: In addition to OOTB rules, Motadata AIOps offers the flexibility to create custom rules tailored to specific organizational needs, security policies, and regulatory requirements. This allows users to:

  • Define compliance requirements that go beyond standard benchmarks.
  • Address unique configuration requirements specific to their environment.
  • Enforce internal security policies and best practices.

Rule Creation Process: Creating a compliance rule in Motadata AIOps involves a two-step process:

Configuration of Rule Conditions: This step involves specifying the criteria that define compliance. Motadata AIOps supports a variety of rule conditions to provide granular control over the assessment process. These conditions may include:

Rule Check-in: This parameter specifies how the configuration should be checked:

Configuration File: The system will analyze the device’s configuration file to determine compliance.

CLI (Command-Line Interface): The system will execute CLI commands on the device and analyze the output to determine compliance.

Rule Configuration: This parameter allows for defining the specific configuration parameters to be checked.

  • Basic: A simplified interface for common configuration checks.
  • Advanced: A more powerful interface for complex configuration checks, allowing for regular expressions and scripting.

Other parameters like Conditions, Result Pattern, Occurrence, and Operation provide further granularity in defining the rule logic, allowing for complex and precise compliance checks.

Definition of General Rule Properties: This step involves setting various attributes for the rule to provide context, control its behaviour, and facilitate management. These properties include:

  • Rule Name and Description: Provide a descriptive name and detailed description for the rule to ensure clear identification and understanding of its purpose.
  • Rule Severity: Indicate the criticality of a non-compliant configuration (e.g., High, Medium, Low). This helps prioritize remediation efforts.
  • Tags: Assign tags to the rule for categorization, filtering, and easier management. This allows for grouping rules based on device type, security domain, or regulatory standard.
  • Rationale: Provide a clear explanation of the reason for the rule and its importance. This helps users understand the context and necessity of the compliance requirement.
  • Impact: Describe the potential consequences or risks associated with a non-compliant configuration. This highlights the importance of adhering to the rule.
  • Default Value: Specify the expected or default value for the configuration parameter being checked.
  • References: Include links to relevant documentation, standards, or regulations that the rule is based on.
  • Additional Information: Provide any other relevant details or instructions related to the rule.

Remediation Action: Motadata AIOps allows users to define automated remediation actions to automatically correct non-compliant configurations, minimizing manual intervention and ensuring rapid resolution of compliance violations. This typically involves:

  • Selecting a Pre-defined Runbook: Choose an existing runbook, which is a pre-configured set of automated steps, to fix the non-compliant configuration.
  • Creating a New Runbook: If a suitable runbook does not already exist, create a new one to automate the necessary remediation steps.

Compliance Policy Functionality:

  • A Compliance Policy defines how a specific Benchmark should be assessed against a particular set of devices. It acts as a bridge between a general benchmark and the specific devices in your environment.
  • While a benchmark is inherently associated with a single technology or standard (e.g., CIS for Cisco devices), a Compliance Policy provides the flexibility to tailor the application of that benchmark to specific devices or groups of devices.
  • The relationship between a Benchmark and a Compliance Policy is typically one-to-one, meaning a single Compliance Policy is associated with a single benchmark. However, a single benchmark can be used in multiple compliance policies.
  • A Compliance Policy can be applied to multiple categories of devices within that technology. For example, you might have a CIS benchmark for Cisco IOS, and then create separate compliance policies to apply that benchmark to different categories of Cisco devices (e.g., routers, switches, firewalls) with potentially slightly different configurations.

Compliance Policy Screen

The Compliance Policy screen in Motadata AIOps provides a centralized interface for managing compliance policies. It displays a list of both default and user-defined compliance policies, along with key information for each policy:

  • Policy Name: The unique identifier for the compliance policy.
  • Description: A detailed explanation of the policy’s purpose and scope.
  • Creation Time: The date and time when the policy was created, providing a historical record.
  • Used Count: The number of monitors (devices) that are associated with the policy, indicating its usage.
  • Tags: User-defined tags associated with the policy for categorization, filtering, and management.
  • Execution Schedule: The defined schedule for running compliance audits using the policy, automating the assessment process.

From this screen, users can perform a variety of actions on existing compliance policies:

  • Edit Policy: Modify the policy’s settings, parameters, and associated rules to adjust the compliance assessment criteria.
  • Set a Schedule: Define or modify the schedule for automated policy execution, ensuring regular and timely compliance checks.
  • Assign/Remove Monitor: Associate or disassociate specific monitors (devices) with the policy, controlling which devices are included in the compliance assessment.
  • Delete Policy: Remove a policy that is no longer needed, streamlining the policy list and maintaining a clean configuration.

Users can also initiate the creation of new compliance policies from this screen, tailoring compliance assessments to their specific requirements.

Creating a Compliance Policy

Creating a Compliance Policy in Motadata AIOps involves specifying several key options to define the scope and behavior of the policy:

  • Policy Name and Description: Provide a descriptive and meaningful name for the policy, along with a detailed description of its purpose and the compliance requirements it enforces.
  • Tag Association: Assign relevant tags to the policy for categorization, filtering, and easier management. This allows for grouping policies based on device type, compliance standard, or organizational unit.
  • Config File Type Selection: Select the type of configuration file that will be used for policy execution. This ensures that the policy is applied correctly to the relevant device configurations.
  • Benchmark Filter by Tags: Choose the specific benchmark to associate with the policy. The system allows filtering benchmarks by tags, simplifying the selection process and ensuring that the correct benchmark is applied.
  • Device Category Selection: Select the category of devices to which the policy will apply (e.g., routers, switches, firewalls). This narrows down the scope of the policy to the relevant device types.
  • Device Selection: Select the specific devices within the chosen category that will be included in the policy assessment. This allows for granular control over which devices are evaluated for compliance.
  • Report Generation: Enable the generation of detailed reports on the assessment results. These reports provide valuable documentation of the compliance status of the selected devices.
  • User Notification: Specify users (via email, contact number, or Microsoft Teams handle) to be notified of the assessment results. This ensures that relevant stakeholders are informed of any compliance violations or successful assessments.

Once the policy is configured, users can:

  • Create Compliance Policy: Save the policy and apply the defined settings.
  • Reset: Clear all fields and start the policy creation process from scratch, allowing for a fresh configuration.
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