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This is the first in a series of posts to help financial firms build out the organizational playbook to achieve 100% compliance. Throughout this series, we’ll be building the roadmap to help your firm work towards 100% Compliance. Just like a perfect 10 in the Olympics or a perfect score on the SAT, 100% compliance is absolutely achievable with the right level of preparation and performance.
Over the next few posts, we’ll cover the pivotal strategies, tools and partnerships that organizations can assemble to achieve 100% compliance in their IT operation. Let’s start with a spotlight on XDR (eXtended Detection and Response) and MXDR (Managed eXtended Detection and Response) and how these solutions support 100% compliance.
XDR Delivers Comprehensive Protection for Comprehensive Compliance
100% compliance requires covering all the bases and being comprehensive about both your internal vulnerabilities and the ever-growing range of external threats to the organization. And it requires more than just identifying these threats and vulnerabilities, but also protecting against them. That’s why XDR is essential to achieving 100% compliance. XDR not only identifies threats and vulnerabilities, but also actively counters these with proactive endpoint protection and other protective measures.
Organizations can’t afford to stand still when it comes to innovation, yet 100% compliance requires that strict regulations are adhered to even as a financial firm’s IT systems grow and evolve. Enter XDR. XDR orchestrates the integration of new products into the enterprise stack on an ongoing basis, enabling firms to stay on top of an ever-expanding set of multiple security solutions while still prioritizing innovation. This ability for firms to cover all their bases is cited by Gartner and other analysts as one of the major selling points for XDR.
Overall, XDR helps maintain 100% compliance at scale by expanding automation use cases to a wider range of SOC response protocols, such as isolating endpoints, blacklisting attack IP addresses and creating DNS sinkholes. The caveat is that these advanced protections don’t happen with the flip of a switch. To fully leverage XDR for 100% compliance, organizations need a seasoned MXDR partner to implement and manage the XDR platform.
MXDR Partnerships Bring Organizations Closer to 100% Compliance
The ideal MXDR partner for 100% compliance is one that can render the compliance to-do list through XDR’s holistic lens – orchestrating countless tactical steps into a larger strategic framework that applies compliance across all enterprise operations. At ECI we call it a Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) Program – built to meet global regulatory requirements as well as the US-based NIST Cybersecurity Framework, SEC cybersecurity rules and other regulations.
Because these rules are wide-ranging across all hardware, software and datasets, a financial company will need to have compliance capabilities that are equally rigorous and comprehensive across the entire firm’s operations. This is once again where the dynamic and scalable nature of XDR becomes a game changer, especially when it’s in the hands of an MXDR partner with the necessary experience to incorporate both IT and financial regulatory considerations into the enterprise IT operation on an ongoing basis.
Critically, the partner must also be highly attuned not just to how regulatory rules affect the organization, but how the rules themselves may change over time (for more on this, see our recent posts recapping a recent webinar on changing regulations). With a solid grasp of the standards for excellence, an organization and its MXDR partner can go about the work of achieving 100% compliance. These combined protections and benefits are just some of the reasons why XDR and MXDR capabilities are key components for building the 100% Compliance Playbook.
