How NetOps and SecOps Evolution to Remedy Community Compliance is Driving Effectivity

April 9, 2025

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Co-authored by Gavin Littleboy

Challenges in Community Compliance

Authorities companies face vital challenges in sustaining community compliance as a result of ever-increasing complexity of rules. From NIST 800-53, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, to different safety requirement guides like DISA Safety Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) for Division of Protection, complete measures require configuring and sustaining networks to make sure they keep compliant and are safe towards vulnerabilities and threats. Compounding this concern are the restricted budgets and assets obtainable inside authorities entities, which may make it tough to allocate adequate personnel and instruments to handle compliance successfully. Moreover, the necessity to combine various applied sciences and legacy methods additional complicates compliance efforts. These methods usually lack the flexibleness wanted to adapt shortly to new and evolving threats, making the duty of attaining and sustaining steady compliance an ongoing battle. Companies are taking a look at how automation and orchestration can assist with these challenges.

Evolution of NetOps and SecOps Groups

The evolution of NetOps and SecOps groups is remodeling how authorities companies method community compliance and safety.

NetOps, DevOps, SecOps confused? See particulars right here – What’s NetOps?

Historically working in silos, these groups at the moment are more and more required to collaborate and handle shared challenges. NetOps groups need to deploy steady community automation and validation to simplify operations, improve velocity and effectivity to ship companies, and enhance efficiency and resiliency of crucial community infrastructure. SecOps groups are always responding to evolving threats similar to vulnerabilities created from configuration errors, uncared for updates, and never having satisfactory visibility into safety posture, delaying response efforts.

The Want for Automation to Scale

Automation is required to scale these efforts, enabling groups to effectively handle routine duties and reply swiftly to threats as community calls for develop. Many technical challenges exist in automating community compliance. For instance, what are we on the lookout for in the case of community compliance? For networks, we’re validating end-of-life tools, code variations, CVE/PSIRTs (Frequent Vulnerabilities and Exposures/Product Safety Incident Response Groups), Safety Implementation guides similar to DoD STIG, and community and organizational requirements. As this listing of compliance issues demonstrates, there are various touchpoints that shortly make compliance a difficult job and turns into a “firefight” situation the place all assets are urgently targeted to make amends for compliance earlier than the following audit. Because it pertains to community configurations, there are three patterns in compliance checks.

Patterns Round Community Compliance

A given compliance requirement necessitates the evaluation of both a community configuration or community state. These checks usually fall into 3 evaluation patterns: match configuration, match variables, or match enterprise logic.

Configuration matches search for precise matches in configuration. Examples embody disabling or enabling of companies similar to http or password-encryption. Variable matches search for partial or variable substitution matches in configuration. Examples embody validating that a number of NTP (Community Time Protocol) servers are configured or that configured BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) neighbors are utilizing authentication. Enterprise logic matches search for organizationally outlined patterns in configuration. Examples embody validating {that a} boundary entry management listing is utilized to the right interface and that it blocks organizational outlined protocols. This final sample is probably the most complicated to implement and varies extensively between organizations primarily based on the native implementation of the required coverage.

As we speak, SecOps groups use their area particular auditing instruments to audit the community and create experiences. These experiences are then shared with the NetOps workforce who should interpret, translate to community area configurations, after which implement the community change. This prolonged course of then repeats.

Automation Permits Steady Compliance

Think about a community automation platform the place NetOps and SecOps can leverage unified tooling to unravel widespread targets and allow steady compliance auditing, reporting, and remediation. Safety groups sometimes describe compliance “intent” within the type of guidelines that validate whether or not a community configuration satisfies the factors. Community operators should fulfill not solely these compliance necessities, however community design necessities and different components when making a closing template to be utilized to the community.

Cisco Crosswork Community Providers Orchestrator (NSO) supplies this functionality by enabling community operators to automate and handle complicated networks with ease with a built-in compliance engine to validate community compliance. It affords a flexible and highly effective resolution that helps configuration administration, service orchestration, and network-wide coverage enforcement. Cisco NSO 6.x comes with vital compliance updates similar to compliance templates, an intuitive compliance reporting interface, and continues to introduce options to cowl the patterns above. Cisco NSO has fashionable APIs and a stateful database the place steady compliance might be validated primarily based on real-time community state and reported as much as northbound methods. Cisco NSO can also be model-driven, that means information fashions and their intents can instantly be translated to supposed implementation state within the community. This permits a brand new paradigm for SecOps groups to have the ability to audit and report compliance checks with the identical tooling and configuration templates that the NetOps workforce have outlined for the community for remediation. With Cisco NSO, groups can guarantee constant compliance throughout multi-vendor community parts, streamline operations, and improve collaboration between completely different groups inside a company.

To be taught extra about Cisco Crosswork NSO or to see examples of tips on how to construct compliance templates, see beneath.

Crosswork NSO Resolution Overview

Compliance Reporting Examples Repository on NSO Developer GitHub

Closing Ideas

Because the roles inside NetOps and SecOps evolve, fostering a tradition of studying and adaptableness ensures that personnel can successfully handle new applied sciences and regulatory necessities. By constructing cross-functional experience and problem-solving capabilities, companies can handle present compliance wants and anticipate future calls for, resulting in extra resilient and responsive operations. Reaching efficient compliance options and leveraging automation yields substantial returns on funding (ROI) for presidency companies, leading to notable value financial savings and enabling companies to allocate assets extra strategically and concentrate on their core missions. This not solely protects the company’s status but additionally ensures the uninterrupted supply of important companies.

To dive deeper into community compliance and automation, be part of us at Cisco Dwell San Diego from June 8-12, 2025 for 2 insightful classes exploring methods and options to reinforce your community operations:

DEVNET-2144 – “Automating Community Compliance: Leveraging Cisco NSO for Compliance Auditing, Reporting, and Remediation”

DEVWKS-2083 – “The Journey of Automating Community Compliance utilizing Cisco NSO”

Register for Cisco Dwell

If you need to be taught extra about how Cisco can assist your compliance wants or to get began in your Automation Journey, attain out to your Account Crew.