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

April 10, 2025

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Co-authored by Gavin Littleboy

Challenges in Community Compliance

Authorities companies face important challenges in sustaining community compliance because of the ever-increasing complexity of laws. 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 difficulty are the restricted budgets and assets out there inside authorities entities, which might make it troublesome to allocate adequate personnel and instruments to handle compliance successfully. Moreover, the necessity to combine various applied sciences and legacy techniques additional complicates compliance efforts. These techniques usually lack the flexibleness wanted to adapt rapidly to new and evolving threats, making the duty of attaining and sustaining steady compliance an ongoing wrestle. Companies are how automation and orchestration will help with these challenges.

Evolution of NetOps and SecOps Groups

The evolution of NetOps and SecOps groups is remodeling how authorities companies strategy 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 pace and effectivity to ship providers, and enhance efficiency and resiliency of essential community infrastructure. SecOps groups are consistently responding to evolving threats akin to vulnerabilities created from configuration errors, uncared for updates, and never having enough 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 searching 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 akin to DoD STIG, and community and organizational requirements. As this checklist of compliance concerns demonstrates, there are a lot of touchpoints that rapidly make compliance a difficult activity and turns into a “firefight” situation the place all assets are urgently centered to compensate 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 typically fall into 3 evaluation patterns: match configuration, match variables, or match enterprise logic.

Configuration matches search for actual matches in configuration. Examples embrace disabling or enabling of providers akin to http or password-encryption. Variable matches search for partial or variable substitution matches in configuration. Examples embrace 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 embrace validating {that a} boundary entry management checklist is utilized to the right interface and that it blocks organizational outlined protocols. This final sample is essentially the most complicated to implement and varies broadly between organizations based mostly on the native implementation of the required coverage.

Immediately, SecOps groups use their area particular auditing instruments to audit the community and create stories. These stories are then shared with the NetOps crew 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 frequent 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 standards. Community operators should fulfill not solely these compliance necessities, however community design necessities and different elements when making a last template to be utilized to the community.

Cisco Crosswork Community Companies Orchestrator (NSO) offers 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 provides a flexible and highly effective answer that helps configuration administration, service orchestration, and network-wide coverage enforcement. Cisco NSO 6.x comes with important compliance updates akin to compliance templates, an intuitive compliance reporting interface, and continues to introduce options to cowl the patterns above. Cisco NSO has trendy APIs and a stateful database the place steady compliance may be validated based mostly on real-time community state and reported as much as northbound techniques. Cisco NSO can also be model-driven, that means knowledge fashions and their intents can instantly be translated to supposed implementation state within the community. This allows 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 crew 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 totally different groups inside a corporation.

To study 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 providers.

To dive deeper into community compliance and automation, be a part of us at Cisco Reside 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 Reside

If you need to study extra about how Cisco will help your compliance wants or to get began in your Automation Journey, attain out to your Account Staff.