Rules are sometimes a contentious subject. Whereas some argue they hinder innovation by introducing extreme paperwork, others contend that the absence of clear guidelines can result in unquantified dangers with wide-reaching penalties—from shoppers and organizations to total markets.
Nonetheless, there are moments when each side of the talk align—and cybersecurity is a kind of instances.
However you could marvel, why cybersecurity? What is occurring on this house that creates the required synergies? The reply is that there are two major drivers for this:
- The rising frequency and class of ransomware assaults have severely impacted organizations, inflicting reputational, monetary, and in some instances, human or vital infrastructure damages
- Underinvestment in cybersecurity instruments and practitioner abilities
These causes are exactly the place laws play a vital function: They intention to deal with these gaps by imposing good safety requirements, imposing penalties for non-compliance, and requiring organizations to allocate sources for prevention, detection, and incident response.
Fortuitously, regulatory our bodies are already appearing. In america, for instance, HIPAA ensures the safety of affected person knowledge inside the healthcare sector, whereas PCI DSS governs the safety of card fee programs within the business house.
Of specific significance are two main laws rising from the European Union, each designed to considerably enhance cybersecurity resilience and threat administration throughout sectors:
- Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA)
- Community and Info Safety Directive (NIS2)
Nonetheless, many organizations face important challenges in terms of implementing these regulatory mandates. Usually, the language utilized in such laws is high-level and lacks prescriptive steerage, making it troublesome to translate necessities into actionable steps. Moreover, organizations might not have the proper instruments, processes or infrastructure in place to successfully implement and operationalize these requirements.
This raises a vital query: How can organizations obtain compliance in a sensible, scalable manner?
NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 to the Rescue
NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 presents useful steerage for organizations seeking to handle and mitigate cybersecurity dangers. Whereas it doesn’t prescribe particular options, it offers a stable construction for translating high-level enterprise aims into actionable technical necessities.
Right here is the place you may leverage any cybersecurity instrument utilizing NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 to implement these technical necessities, given the instrument has the mandatory capabilities and functionalities to deal with them.
Enter Cisco Safe Workload.
Cisco Safe Workload is a holistic safety resolution designed to ship in-depth utility workload visibility and safety throughout on-premises and multicloud environments. Safe Workload focuses on three major use instances:
- Zero Belief Microsegmentation: Utilizing agent and agentless approaches, Safe Workload can uncover workloads primarily based on labels, mechanically uncover and counsel segmentation insurance policies primarily based on visitors flows, validate and check the coverage with none operational influence, and implement the dynamic coverage on a number of enforcement factors similar to host-based firewalls, Knowledge Processing Items (DPUs), community firewalls, load balancers, and built-in cloud safety controls.
- Vulnerability Detection and Safety: Using an agent, Safe Workload offers visibility into the applying workload runtime, enabling the detection of weak packages and weak container photos. It then leverages this info utilizing vulnerability (Widespread Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) attribute-based insurance policies to quarantine workloads or carry out digital patching by way of Safe Firewall.
- Behavioral Detection and Safety: Safe Workload screens operating course of for modifications in conduct and an in depth course of tree and course of snapshot. It detects anomalous conduct utilizing MITRE ATT&CK or with customized forensic guidelines. By leveraging Safe Firewall’s Fast Menace Containment, safety of each agent and agentless workloads could be achieved.


As you may see, Safe Workload presents the breadth and depth of capabilities wanted to function a core cybersecurity instrument. However the important thing query stays: How can we successfully correlate and map these options to particular technical necessities?
Mapping DORA and NIS2 to NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0
DORA and NIS2 necessities are sometimes high-level, requiring IT groups and NetSec groups to interpret and translate them into actionable technical controls for implementation.
To streamline this course of, organizations can leverage NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 as a foundational reference. By mapping its steerage to Safe Workload capabilities, we will successfully translate those self same necessities into sensible, tool-driven implementations aligned with DORA and NIS2 mandates.






The Microsegmentation Journey With NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 and Safe Workload
Microsegmentation redefines conventional community safety by shifting the perimeter to the person asset. It creates micro-perimeters throughout multi-cloud environments, isolating and securing every workload independently.
This method has turn into a sensible basis for implementing zero belief architectures, because it allows the enforcement of least privilege entry on the community stage.
Nonetheless, operationalizing microsegmentation stays a major problem. It requires shut collaboration throughout varied groups—safety, networking, operations, and compliance—which might create complexity and friction. For a deeper dive into these challenges and how one can overcome them, I like to recommend studying the weblog put up “Enterprise Chief’s Information for a Profitable Microsegmentation Undertaking” by my colleague Brijeshkumar Shah.
That is the place Cisco Safe Workload turns into the toolset that may allow organizations to efficiently implement microsegmentation, whereas additionally supporting compliance efforts. By fostering collaboration throughout groups and integrating with present processes, Safe Workload helps make zero belief achievable and scalable.


Navigating Compliance with the Proper Method and Instruments
Regulatory and compliance mandates could be complicated and difficult to navigate. Nonetheless, with the proper method—translating enterprise necessities into actionable technical controls—and the proper toolset to implement them, the trail to attaining compliance turns into much more manageable. To see how Cisco Safe Workload can assist your compliance journey, take a look at my Cisco Stay session, the place I showcase dwell demos and sensible examples of how this resolution could be utilized to fulfill regulatory necessities successfully.
Wish to be taught extra? Try the Cisco Safe Workload product web page.
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