3 Steps to Simplify Audits, Demonstrate Compliance and Manage Risk Across the Enterprise

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By Attachmate Luminet 

Trusted employees commit more compliance violations than anyone else. Government and industry groups have responded by enacting regulations designed to protect public and shareholder interests. But your business generates enormous volumes of network traffic every day. Tracking all user activity and then sifting through it for abuse, misuse and error can feel like an impossible task.

What if you could:  

Quickly piece together data on multiple systems in multiple departments to create a comprehensive audit trail and demonstrate compliance?

Analyze data and respond to auditor requests for information more quickly and efficiently than you ever thought possible?

Test your level of compliance prior to an external audit?

Respond to updated regulations by changing a few rules rather than remapping log outputs to compliance requirements?

Retrieve clear and actionable evidence—long after the user activity occurred?

With the latest generation of enterprise fraud management software you can do all that and more—without adding controls or changing a single line of code. With these technologies in place, you can take a proactive approach to fraud while you improve your risk profile overall. These technologies provide you with new ways to see, record and analyze all user activity and extract patterns of behavior as well as singular instances of fraud.

Perhaps of even greater value to your organization, these solutions can help you meet key requirements of these and many other regulations: PCI DSS, FACTA Red Flag Reporting, FFIEC, GLBA, HIPAA, HIPAA-HITECH, SOX, FISMA, PIPEDA, Basel II.  

Move Beyond Traditional Logging and Improve Auditing Capabilities  

In the absence of true application monitoring technology, application logging has become the de facto method used to demonstrate compliance. But as enterprise applications become more distributed and encompass more complex functionality, the ability to force traditional logging to function as a modern fraud, audit and compliance solution has become increasingly untenable. Without current controls or auditing functions, they can't provide a full or accurate picture of who did what, and when. Fortunately, the next generation monitoring technologies can.

They can help you in the following ways: they can help you to scrambling to piece together incomplete data on scattered enterprise systems in order to produce an audit trail. Assist you with ways to quickly determine if policies and procedures are being followed. And give you a way to run historical queries, pattern analysis and behavioral analytics against user activity to place keystrokes into context.

Here's how:  

Step 1: Capture the data
Many of the next generation fraud technologies record user activity in real time—screen by screen, keystroke by keystroke—creating an audit trail directly from the network. This audit trail includes both update and read-only actions for both regular and privileged users. Stored in a secured, digitally signed repository, this information can visually play back screens, keystrokes, and activities to effectively support your audit.

Step 2: Analyze the data
Leading analytics engines help track user behavior in real time, detecting cross-channel patterns and visually revealing activities and relationships. In this way, it can pinpoint suspicious actions—based on business rules and weighted scores that you've defined—and generate real-time alerts while helping to eliminate false positives.

Step 3: Generate relevant, custom audit reports
Auditors expect precise and detailed information about how the thousands of people across your enterprise are accessing sensitive information on hundreds of applications each day. They also expect to see this information presented in a format that aligns with their unique regulatory requirements. With today's leading enterprise fraud management software, you can easily access specific audit information at any time. There's no need to manually extract more or different data from log files—or worse, force auditors to guess what happened when log files fall short.
 

As you consider your next round of upgrades to your current fraud investigation and audit tools, I would encourage you to examine some of these newer technologies. You'll find that in addition to comprehensive analysis and audit support, they include state-of-the-art investigation centers and link analysis tools. Drop me a note and I would be happy to provide you with some additional information and links to the leading solutions.

Christine Meyers is an expert on enterprise fraud, investigation and behavioral analytics. She also is the product marketing manager for Attachmate Luminet, an enterprise fraud management solution that sees, records and analyzes user activity across all IT applications. She regularly Tweets on fraud and GRC-related issues @LuminetEFM.