Compliance Foresight

With companies using more software applications than ever before, cyber security compliance has become a necessity today. While most organizations are adding security controls to their software ecosystem, gaining real-time insights on safety and compliance is still a major challenge for most. 

To meet the required cybersecurity requirements of an organization, real-time and continuous compliance maintenance is essential. This ensures that the business moves forward in the right direction with minimum risks and vulnerabilities involved. Companies, therefore, look for a holistic approach to cyber security compliance to deal with their daily requirements, such as:

• Regulatory compliance
• Security frameworks and standards
• Local & global government requirements
• Transparency and standardization of business processes

As a result of multiple applications being used by different teams within an organization, day-to-day operations and reports often remain scattered, making businesses susceptible to risks. Additionally, they have to deal with numerous integrations pertaining to their SaaS applications, making it difficult to ensure cybersecurity compliance. 

With most business transactions becoming digital in nature and increased dependence on online media, the importance of continuous cyber security assessment has grown manifold. Additionally, with data flowing across multiple institutions and devices, regulatory bodies are keeping a close watch on organizations, increasing cybersecurity competitiveness.

Commercial and financial sectors such as banks, non-banking financial corporations (NBFCs), fintech organizations, data centres (both cloud and on-premise), and rapidly growing eCommerce and manufacturing organizations functioning today require effective, all-encompassing, and easily deployable cyber security compliance solutions.

Additionally, such solutions need to be integrated fully into their business to minimize risks and be scalable, sustained and cost-effective. Such risk management solutions must also be available across the cloud and accessible in real-time.

Unfortunately, only a handful of solutions can address such diverse compliance needs, mitigate risks collectively, and cater to fast-growing SMBs and MSMEs, especially in the Indian subcontinent. The majority of such applications only cater to the needs of larger organizations and are exorbitantly priced.

However, a few modern-age providers are addressing the above needs with great precision and allowing SMBs & MSMEs to head towards GRC (Governance, Risk & Compliance) – a comprehensive risk management plan that helps discover and categorize all risks an organization faces.

This review will focus on Whitehats Compliance Foresight – an innovative, integrated, scalable cyber security compliance solution that allows businesses to operate with lower risks and offers all-around visibility over applications, compliance requirements, and data usage. Through this review, we will cover the following points:

• Introduction to Whitehats Compliance Foresight
• Key Features of Whitehats Compliance Foresight
• Comparison with existing solutions
• Our Final Verdict

So let’s begin, shall we?

Introduction to Whitehats Compliance Foresight

Whitehats Compliance Foresight is a modern-age cybersecurity solution that helps organizations manage critical compliance such as risk management, vulnerability management, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001: 2013, and control testing through an integrated and easy-to-use framework.

This highly-scalable GRC framework offers prebuilt compliances and customized cybersecurity solutions. In addition, the application allows you to integrate any given solution to map the risks associated and offers real-time visibility over governance data.

Compliance Foresight allows you to create, define and personalize your firm’s compliance framework and has an array of in-built questionnaires and regulations that you can add based on your industry.

The application offers fast ROI, can be set up in less than 24 hours (2 hours for the SaaS model) and is very cost-effective. Additionally, you do not need any 3rd party/partner support to generate reports and have to bear no extra service costs.

Compliance Foresight offers a ready-to-use ODAS (On Demand Application Security) module with HCL AppScan Integrated. This self-service module allows customers to purchase modules as per their needs.

Besides offering continuous security for small organizations, the ODAS model also offers automated, scheduled and manual scans for bulk/unlimited organizational requirements, apart from trend analysis and PDF reports.

While most organizations use checklist-based excel tools to map relevant audits and risk parameters to track the compliance level, Compliance Foresight automates the process and allows you to perform control testing.

It offers CCaaS (Cyber Compliance as a Service) model with inbuilt PCI DSS and ISO 27001: 2013 compliance, which is accessible over VPN and cloud service models to ensure easy availability for updates in software. 

Compliance Foresight makes it easy for organizations to manage security governance and meet regulatory requirements. It offers useful data insights via a range of dashboards that help organizations make informed decisions. Such actionable insights and configurable workflow automations help SMBs and MSMEs meet their daily cybersecurity and compliance needs. 

Compliance Foresight makes policy designing easier and comes with a pay-as-you-go (quarterly/monthly/yearly) model. The application’s on-demand application security model allows fast-growing organizations to perform multiple audits through a single platform. Additionally, it is available as an MSSP model so that service providers can deliver GRC for their own customers/clients with ease. 

Impressed already? We haven’t come to the best features yet!

Key Features/Modules of Whitehats Compliance Foresight

1. Risk Management

While it is important for organizations to identify and mitigate business risks, complex business processes, changing regulatory requirements, and integrations with multiple tools make it challenging to track risks at every level. Compliance Foresight’s Risk Management enables you to make automated and manual(questionnaire-based) risk assessments to ensure that no crucial compliance measure is left out.

Compliance Foresight offers a dedicated Risk Matrix, Risk Register, and Risk Trend Analysis views that allow you to map present and future vulnerabilities. Further, it allows you to segregate IT risks by business processes, departments, business units, asset type and risk type (technical or non-technical). Customized questionnaires also allow you to map domains and perform risk assessments effortlessly. 

Compliance Foresight provides fully automated regular audit reports and maps all necessary compliance parameters. Further, it generates detailed PDF and Word reports that allow you to have a holistic view of your operations. Compliance Foresight offers multiple audits for customers at regular intervals to ensure that the necessary compliance levels are achieved.

2. Policy Management

Creating policies is one of the most crucial aspects of any cybersecurity firm. Effective and well-planned policies that are easy to understand and instantly available make policy management successful. Compliance Foresight allows you to automate workflows and simplifies the design and implementation of policies based on organizational, regional and global standards. Being deployed through a SaaS model, such policies are easily accessible and can be downloaded in PDF format. 

3. PCI DSS

Organizations dealing with digital financial transactions and debit/credit card data require critical compliance in the form of PCI DSS. The margin of error is minimal in this framework and comes with very few exceptions. All information, like protection of cardholder’s data to its encrypted transmission across public networks and security guidelines, is handled via PCIDSS.

Compliance Foresight offers an easy-to-use interface and thorough testing process for PCIDSS and comes with real-time evidence mapping. It allows you to configure the auditor flow for more efficient approvals and keep track of the compliance level that your firm is operating on. 

4. Integrated Vulnerability Management

With data flowing across multiple businesses and devices simultaneously, protecting such systems and data has become of utmost importance to companies today. Hence, data must be secure and instantly (and automatically) accessible to the right individuals, keeping in mind the organization’s compliance requirements.

Compliance Foresight integrates all complex solutions within an organization into a single application and ensures real-time visibility of vulnerabilities over apps, devices, and servers.

It seamlessly integrates with vulnerability management (VM) and OEM solutions via APIs. It eliminates the process of logging into multiple tools to fetch reports and offers both one-way and two-way integrations by managing such operations within the solution itself, reducing complexities greatly.

Compliance Foresight’s integrated VM solution provides ready-to-use integrations using API or data feeds. It offers the most comprehensive VM operations for the entire business, providing an in-depth oversight that helps the management of Vulnerability Assessments (VA), Penetration Testing (PT) and application security (SAST & DAST) through a centralized console. 

Integrated VM also means you do not need to log in to any other VM tool/application. Compliance Foresight’s VM automation platform allows you to manage all your applications from an integrated VM interface. Furthermore, the integrated VM is available both as an MSSP model (for organizations serving their clients) and for end-users as well.

5. Exception Management

Running an organization successfully involves managing lots of exceptions to manage compliance. However, exceptions can also lead to security breaches if not managed effectively. In addition, distributed organizations find it extremely difficult to track, record, and manage data so critical business data is never leaked. 

Compliance Foresight features a centralized dashboard to easily manage all user-based exceptions and track compliance levels (and their expectations). Additionally, custom workflows and evidence mapping help you trace active, expired, and soon-to-be lapsing exceptions.

6. 3rd Party Risk Assessments

Managing risks for 3rd parties is an additional responsibility that many organizations undertake. However, traditional processes follow a rather scattered approach involving already-established processes and manual data verifications, both of which are prone to errors and tedious in nature.

Compliance Foresight ensures the efficiency and accuracy of the 3rd party risk management process while improving the security of such processes. This allows businesses to generate multiple assessments and monitor compliance via a centralized repository. The application also offers vendor assessments and onboarding, security prioritization, trend analysis, and real-time posture checks with 3rd parties.

7. ISO 27001: 2013 Compliance

Compliance Foresight allows you to automate your entire ISO 27001: 2013 compliance via its workflow-enabled solution. Additionally, real-time dashboards and analysis allow you to stay on top of compliance. The application comes with CISO dashboards and clause & control testing.

With Compliance Foresight, processes, policies, and technical deliveries can be automated to make your organization perennially compliant. In addition, the application enables you to track and map applicable clauses and controls to enhance management visibility and compliance levels. 

8. Audit Management

Managing multiple compliances through regular audits has become critical for organizations today. Compliance Foresight automates your entire audit management process and provides superior compliance visibility. The application offers real-time tracking and custom workflows enabled with evidence mappings, which allows you to manage your company’s audit lifecycle.

Besides tracking compliance levels through multiple dedicated dashboards, Compliance Foresight allows you to schedule assessments or conduct them on demand. You can also conduct trend analysis and audits for different business units and departments in a few clicks.

9. Multiple Dashboards

Compliance Foresight offers an array of dashboards to let you map your organizational compliance. For instance, the CISO dashboard offers a comprehensive overview of compliant, non-compliant, partially-compliant and untested applications.

The PCI dashboard allows you to check compliance status, compliance controls, partial and non-compliant controls, and controls pending review. Similarly, the ISO dashboard informs you about the domain-wise compliance status of applications, along with their exceptions and corrective action status.

Compliance Foresight also provides you with a questionnaire-based risk dashboard, an asset-based organizational risk dashboard, and a department risk dashboard. There are several other useful dashboards that you can benefit from, such as:

• Vendor Risk Management Dashboard
• Audit Management Dashboard
• Exception Management Dashboard
• CCF Dashboard
• SOC2 Dashboard
• Vulnerability Management Dashboard

The Final Verdict

Whitehats Compliance Foresight offers several useful tools to help rapidly evolving organizations manage, automate and streamline their compliance needs. It offers a range of cybersecurity compliance management functions that make it simpler for corporations to upgrade and improve their GRC.

This highly-customizable application offers ready-to-use compliances and on-demand application security that only a few Indian companies offer.

Compliance Foresight is created for easy deployment and delivers faster returns on investment. Additionally, it is very user-friendly and covers several compliance functions for GRC.

Given the application’s ability to map the risks associated with any solution/tool and the real-time visibility it offers, we are inclined to give Whitehats Compliance Foresight a ‘Perfect Ten’ – owing to its innovativeness and potential impact on emerging businesses in the Indian subcontinent and beyond it.