Lockdown Network Access Control — Sarbanes–Oxley and PCI Solutions
Regulatory compliance mandates are a part of corporate life. But that doesn't mean compliance needs to be excessively complex.
Lockdown network access control (NAC) provides the essential technologies required to automate mandated security practices, providing valuable audit trails, and easing passage of compliance audits.
Overview
Public companies are regulated by government legislation, such as the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX), and companies processing credit cards must comply with Payment Card Industry (PCI).
In Section 404 of the act, guidelines are outlined for risk assessment and control as well as monitoring and reporting. PCI, meanwhile, requires periodic audits of networks for vulnerabilities that could expose confidential data.
Public companies are required to establish standards for safeguarding their electronic data to protect sensitive information such as banking and customer records and to prevent exposures, fraud, and abuse.
Lockdown network access control for public companies needing to comply with SOX, provides the highest levels of policy enforcement to ensure everyone on the network is compliant and enables only authorized users gain appropriate network access.
Public companies have numerous mission–critical computing resources, such as transaction support systems. Lockdown network access control allows IT administrators to create sophisticated policies or rule sets that analyze data from numerous inputs to make intelligent access and health decisions specific to each user, device, connection method, or health status. Lockdown network access control can identify mission–critical devices and notify IT administrators with compliance violations instead of quarantining these devices for remediation. This allows administrators to schedule change management and service the devices when it's appropriate.
Many public companies participate in networks or financial systems that allow them to pool resources, increase efficiency and provide customers better services. This also means incredibly heterogeneous computing environments. Lockdown network access control integrates with existing infrastructure regardless of vendor – no upgrades – so you can benefit from network access control today.
How It Works
For SOX compliance, Lockdown Enforcer™ provides the ability to automate policies related to section 404 compliance in the following ways:
- Secure authentication processes. By isolating device BEFORE they join the network, it becomes much harder for malicious users to bypass authentication processes or join the network using simple tricks like creating static IP addresses.
- Lockdown audits all devices on the network for security policy compliance, eliminating the potential for users to inadvertently (or deliberately) disable or unistall security software required to maintain section 404 compliance.
- Many public companies have numerous branch locations. These facilities are geographically seperated from the main campus, and often allow guest and vendor network access. Lockdown provides cost–effective coverage for remote locations, as well as the network core.
For PCI compliance:
- Lockdown network access control provides regular and on–demand audits for ALL networked devices for vulnerabilities and policy compliance. This ensures that when a PCI audit is performed, most if not all devices will already be assured of compliance.
Why Lockdown Network Access Control
Public companies choose Lockdown network access control for many reasons including but not limited to cost effectiveness, Precision Policy and ease of implementation.
- Automates registration of guest users and devices, and associates devices to users. Enables secure quest access with little or no IT support, without putting secure networks at risk.
- Secures authentication process, while preserving single sign–on.
- Precision Policy Engine to deal with situations such as creating policies specific to a data center, or to specific user groups.
- Ability to assess all devices on the network for policy compliance, not just agentable systems, improving both SOX and PCI compliance.
- Sophisticated reporting capabilities to support SOX audits.