Regulatory Compliance
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Organizations across various industries struggle to effectively achieve and maintain compliance in today’s complex and ever-evolving regulatory environment— leading to increased operational costs, legal vulnerabilities, and reputation damage. Organizations require integrated, cost-effective solutions that can manage access and protect data across multiple applications, while ensuring compliance with multiple overlapping regulations.
Organizations across various industries struggle to effectively achieve and maintain compliance in today’s complex and ever-evolving regulatory environment— leading to increased operational costs, legal vulnerabilities, and reputation damage. Organizations require integrated, cost-effective solutions that can manage access and protect data across multiple applications, while ensuring compliance with multiple overlapping regulations.
NextLabs’ Solution for the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) Program
Discover more about CMMC requirements and how NextLabs can help streamline CMMC compliance
Electronic Export Control
Explore automated compliance with electronic export regulations such as US ITAR, EAR, German BAFA and UK Export Control Act
NextLabs and the GDPR
Discover how NextLabs automates GDPR compliance and security policies, protecting and controlling access to personally identifiable information to prevent security violations
Need-to-Know
With the expansion of global operations, a common challenge that organizations face with data privacy and security regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act, and International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), is to prevent disclosure of sensitive information by establishing controls. Since regulations usually mandate specific security measures to protect personal data and confidential information, organizations with diverse IT infrastructures may struggle to implement and maintain consistent data security measures such as access controls and encryption across various applications automatically in real-time need-to-know basis to prevent mishandling of controlled data and unauthorized access.
Cross-Border Data Transfer
International data transfers have been one of the top compliance and legal concerns for global organizations. Some regulations, such as export control regulations, impose restrictions on the transfer of data across borders which can be challenging for multinational organizations that need to move data between different regions while complying with localization requirements. Certain regulations may also require that certain types of data need to be stored locally, limiting organizations’ ability to centralize data storage and management. Organizations need to ensure that sensitive data are persistently protected, and they need to constantly monitor and adapt their data transfer mechanisms to comply with the ever-changing regulations to prevent the risk of unauthorized access or breaches during data transfer.
Audit and Reporting Requirements
Regulations often require organizations to maintain detailed records of security measures, incidents, and actions taken. Reports enhance transparency and fosters accountability, allowing auditors to assess the effectiveness of internal controls and the responsible use of resources. However, managing and analyzing data activities effectively in real-time at a low cost can be challenging, especially in large organizations that possess a vast amount of data. Moreover, human review of audit logs limits the effectiveness of auditing process since the human eye may not always identify subtle or sophisticated security threats. It is necessary for organizations to have mechanisms in place to streamline reporting and audit requirements to prevent a delay between data collection and analysis of security incidents.
Outsourcing and Offshoring
Some A&D companies are hesitant to leverage outsourcing or offshoring due to the lack of technology to address concerns about inconsistent or inadequate global data protection regulations, leading to higher costs and reduced competitiveness. However, to stay competitive in the global market, there is a growing interest in outsourcing and offshoring to improve efficiency and lower costs. Sharing proprietary information with external entities increases the risk of unauthorized access or disclosure, highlighting the need for a data-centric security approach to protect data regardless of its location.
Data-Centric Security Solutions to Safeguard Sensitive Technologies and IP
Protecting classified information such as sensitive technology and IP is crucial to A&D companies to maintain competitive advantage and safeguard national security. This necessitates a comprehensive data-centric approach that involves the following:
Unified Policy Platform
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) advocates for a policy engine that applies dynamic authorization to implement an attribute-based access control (ABAC) model. By taking in real-time attributes and applying pre-defined policies, informed decisions can be made, and actions initiated can be automated. The policy engine provides a unified approach to enforcing and consistently maintaining complex rules across diverse systems and applications from a centralized platform. It provides the flexibility to make changes to access rights on the fly via policy without complex customization and manual procedures. This methodology offers enhanced scalability and security, enabling fine-grained access controls and centralized auditing and reporting.
Data-Centric Security Enforcement
Data-centric security controls protect the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of data and applications to prevent wrongful disclosure. Granular access controls are vital for automated, real-time, need-to-know access to data, which are categorized based on sensitivity to ensure proper handling of sensitive information. Data obfuscation and segregation policies are necessary to ensure that only authorized users can view, edit, create, or delete the fields or records they are granted access to, enabling adherence to data privacy regulations. In addition, digital rights management (DRM) is required to persistently protect digital information shared or transferred across the extended enterprise or across borders, ensuring that data cannot be accessed by unauthorized users even if they receive it.
Automation and Prevention
A policy engine automates security controls and compliance procedures by centrally managing, defining, updating, and maintaining policies in a single location, ensuring that policies are always up to date. Through integration with systems and applications, the policy engine monitors real-time events and enforces policies automatically based on specific context of data access or use. With preventive controls, unauthorized access, disclosure, modification, or destruction of sensitive information can be averted, providing better security and preventing data breaches. This enhances the organization’s ability to adapt to evolving regulatory changes and minimize compliance risks.
Real-time Logging and Visibility
Real-time logging is crucial for regulatory compliance as it involves the continuous and instantaneous recording of activities, and transactions from multiple sources as they occur within an information system. By consolidating activities and transactions onto a centralized platform, it provides organizations with a comprehensive view of the data activities, streamlining the audit and reporting process. This approach allows for efficient monitoring, analysis, and reporting on various aspects of the business’ data and applications, enhancing visibility into compliance and security while preventing wrongful disclosures.
NextLabs Solution
CloudAz Centralized Policy Platform
CloudAz applies the zero trust principles to secure access and protect data across silos using attribute-based policies. CloudAz secures resources by eliminating implicit trust and verifying every stage of a digital interaction. This reduces the risk of cyber-attacks and external adversaries in this sector where national security and proprietary technologies are of prime importance.
SkyDRM Digital Rights Management
Many A&D sensitive technologies and designs are stored in PLM or CAD applications, underscoring the need to protect data in PLM and CAD. SkyDRM enables seamless global sharing of valuable intellectual property from PLM applications, such as Siemens Teamcenter and Bentley ProjectWise, with real-time access and usage controls. Furthermore, it can protect the rights of CAD files, such as AutoCAD and PTC Creo, ensuring organizations share critical information securely with third parties, including offshore, outsourced, and supply chain partners.
Data Access Enforcer (DAE) Data-Level Security Controls
DAE enforces “need-to-know” data access at runtime using fine-grained attribute-based policies. DAE provides dynamic data masking and segregation capabilities compatible with cross-domain policies. By dynamically segregating data based on policies, data can only be viewed by authorized users with permitted access. The content can also be modified according to attribute-based policies with data masking, and with format preserving encryption (FPE) capabilities, confidential information such as export controlled data can be protected even if shared with unauthorized users.
Application Enforcer
In the A&D industry, valuable information is often shared internally or externally with vendors and contractors via various applications such as SharePoint and SAP. NextLabs’ Application Enforcer for SharePoint automates information controls by identifying, classifying, and persistently protecting data uploaded to SharePoint, even after it leaves the application. This supports a collaborative culture and governance process that enables secure sharing of information with external parties. NextLabs’ Application Enforcer for SAP ERP enforces real-time segregation of duties policies to prevent single individuals from controlling all process phases or transactions, safeguarding sensitive SAP data and meeting compliance needs.
CloudAz Report Server
CloudAz simplifies audit processes with centralized logging and reporting of all data access activity and authorization decisions. Reports also notify project managers and team members whenever a user tries to export classified data outside of the export-regulated project collaboration locations. Centralized visibility enables organizations to prevent non-compliance activities and maintain comprehensive reporting for audit and compliance purposes.
Ensure Regulatory Compliance with Data Security
To address the challenges surrounding the need-to-know, cross-border data transfers and audit and reporting requirements, organizations need to implement a comprehensive and proactive approach to data security that contains the following elements:
Unified Policy Platform
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) advocates for a policy engine that applies dynamic authorization to implement an attribute-based access control (ABAC) model. By taking in real-time attributes and applying pre-defined policies, informed decisions can be made, and actions initiated can be automated. The policy engine provides a unified approach to enforcing and consistently maintaining complex rules across diverse systems and applications from a centralized platform. It provides the flexibility to make changes to access rights on the fly via policy without complex customization and manual procedures. This methodology offers enhanced scalability and security, enabling fine-grained access controls and centralized auditing and reporting.
Data-Centric Security Enforcement
Data-centric security controls protect the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of data and applications to prevent wrongful disclosure. Granular access controls are vital for automated, real-time, need-to-know access to data, which are categorized based on sensitivity to ensure proper handling of sensitive information. Data obfuscation and segregation policies are necessary to ensure that only authorized users can view, edit, create, or delete the fields or records they are granted access to, enabling adherence to data privacy regulations. In addition, digital rights management (DRM) is required to persistently protect digital information shared or transferred across the extended enterprise or across borders, ensuring that data cannot be accessed by unauthorized users even if they receive it.
Automation and Prevention
A policy engine automates security controls and compliance procedures by centrally managing, defining, updating, and maintaining policies in a single location, ensuring that policies are always up to date. Through integration with systems and applications, the policy engine monitors real-time events and enforces policies automatically based on specific context of data access or use. With preventive controls, unauthorized access, disclosure, modification, or destruction of sensitive information can be averted, providing better security and preventing data breaches. This enhances the organization’s ability to adapt to evolving regulatory changes and minimize compliance risks.
Real-time Logging and Visibility
Real-time logging is crucial for regulatory compliance as it involves the continuous and instantaneous recording of activities, and transactions from multiple sources as they occur within an information system. By consolidating activities and transactions onto a centralized platform, it provides organizations with a comprehensive view of the data activities, streamlining the audit and reporting process. This approach allows for efficient monitoring, analysis, and reporting on various aspects of the business’ data and applications, enhancing visibility into compliance and security while preventing wrongful disclosures.
Need-to-Know
With the expansion of global operations, a common challenge that organizations face with data privacy and security regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act, and International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), is to prevent disclosure of sensitive information by establishing controls. Since regulations usually mandate specific security measures to protect personal data and confidential information, organizations with diverse IT infrastructures may struggle to implement and maintain consistent data security measures such as access controls and encryption across various applications automatically in real-time need-to-know basis to prevent mishandling of controlled data and unauthorized access.
Cross-Border Data Transfer
International data transfers have been one of the top compliance and legal concerns for global organizations. Some regulations, such as export control regulations, impose restrictions on the transfer of data across borders which can be challenging for multinational organizations that need to move data between different regions while complying with localization requirements. Certain regulations may also require that certain types of data need to be stored locally, limiting organizations’ ability to centralize data storage and management. Organizations need to ensure that sensitive data are persistently protected, and they need to constantly monitor and adapt their data transfer mechanisms to comply with the ever-changing regulations to prevent the risk of unauthorized access or breaches during data transfer.
Audit and Reporting Requirements
Regulations often require organizations to maintain detailed records of security measures, incidents, and actions taken. Reports enhance transparency and fosters accountability, allowing auditors to assess the effectiveness of internal controls and the responsible use of resources. However, managing and analyzing data activities effectively in real-time at a low cost can be challenging, especially in large organizations that possess a vast amount of data. Moreover, human review of audit logs limits the effectiveness of auditing process since the human eye may not always identify subtle or sophisticated security threats. It is necessary for organizations to have mechanisms in place to streamline reporting and audit requirements to prevent a delay between data collection and analysis of security incidents.
Complex Regulatory Environment across Global Operations
Due to the dynamic and multifaceted nature of regulations, staying up to date with the regulatory changes is a significant challenge. These regulations can differ based on industry, jurisdiction, and more.
Organizations must navigate a maze of diverse regulations across jurisdictions and industries. Furthermore, different countries and regions often have distinct and evolving regulatory frameworks governing areas such as data privacy, financial transactions, and industry-specific practices. This results in a complex and dynamic environment for businesses, increasing the risk of inadvertent violations, and difficulties in maintaining consistency in regulatory adherence.
Proof of Compliance
With more complex operations and combinations of regulations, organizations must maintain records, conduct internal audits, and produce proof of compliance, which can be time consuming and labor-intensive.
The complex and dynamic nature of regulatory requirements heightened the need for organizations to maintain meticulous documentation, conduct regular audits and keep abreast of changes in compliance standards. Providing comprehensive and real-time information of compliance status is challenging, especially with global operations, and varying regulations for different industries and regions.
Overlapping Regulatory Regimes
Overlapping or conflicting regulatory requirements may create ambiguity and uncertainty for organizations. Organizations may need to comply with and navigate the requirements of multiple regulatory bodies.
Organizations may need to simultaneously adhere to multiple, sometimes conflicting, sets of regulations, increasing the complexity of compliance efforts and potential violations. This challenge is particularly evident in global operations where entities are subject to diverse regional and industry-specific regulations.
Challenges
Need-to-Know
With the expansion of global operations, a common challenge that organizations face with data privacy and security regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act, and International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), is to prevent disclosure of sensitive information by establishing controls. Since regulations usually mandate specific security measures to protect personal data and confidential information, organizations with diverse IT infrastructures may struggle to implement and maintain consistent data security measures such as access controls and encryption across various applications automatically in real-time need-to-know basis to prevent mishandling of controlled data and unauthorized access.
Need-to-Know
With the expansion of global operations, a common challenge that organizations face with data privacy and security regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act, and International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), is to prevent disclosure of sensitive information by establishing controls. Since regulations usually mandate specific security measures to protect personal data and confidential information, organizations with diverse IT infrastructures may struggle to implement and maintain consistent data security measures such as access controls and encryption across various applications automatically in real-time need-to-know basis to prevent mishandling of controlled data and unauthorized access.
Audit and Reporting Requirements
Regulations often require organizations to maintain detailed records of security measures, incidents, and actions taken. Reports enhance transparency and fosters accountability, allowing auditors to assess the effectiveness of internal controls and the responsible use of resources. However, managing and analyzing data activities effectively in real-time at a low cost can be challenging, especially in large organizations that possess a vast amount of data. Moreover, human review of audit logs limits the effectiveness of auditing process since the human eye may not always identify subtle or sophisticated security threats. It is necessary for organizations to have mechanisms in place to streamline reporting and audit requirements to prevent a delay between data collection and analysis of security incidents.
Robust Data-Security Policies
Robust data security policies help establish the framework for adhering to regulatory compliance and protecting sensitive data while preventing data breaches. The framework for developing the policies includes data classification, access controls, and data retention.
Data-Centric Security
Preventing disclosure of sensitive information requires the establishment of data-centric security controls to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data and applications. For automated, real-time, need-to-know access to data and applications, granular access controls are vital. These controls should categorize data based on sensitivity, ensuring proper handling of sensitive information. As data privacy regulations necessitates that data should only be viewed by authorized individuals or groups, enforcing data obfuscation and segregation policies ensure that only authorized users can view the fields or records they are granted access to. Authorized users can be given the necessary permissions to edit, create, or delete only a subset of the data using fine-grained data-level controls. Furthermore, to safeguard digital information for regulations like export regulations, digital rights management (DRM) is required to persistently protect data when documents or files are shared or transferred across the extended enterprise or across borders, ensuring that unauthorized users will not be able to access the data even if they receive it.
Continuous Monitoring & Response
Organizations must have real-time oversight of organizational activities to detect and address compliance violations, consistently adhering to required regulations and standards. It provides ongoing assessment of an organization’s compliance posture, reducing the risk of regulatory violations.
Compliance Auditing
Compliance audits must cover data security policies, data access controls, data handling procedures, and employee training. By regularly auditing their data security practices, organizations in highly regulated industries can identify and address compliance gaps, reduce risks, and maintain regulatory compliance.
Automate Policy Enforcement and Preventive Controls
The automation of policy enforcement allows preventive controls to be implemented and policies can be reviewed periodically and kept up to date, enhancing the organization’s ability to adapt to evolving regulatory landscapes and minimize compliance risks.
NextLabs Solution
CloudAz Unified Policy Platform
CloudAz is a Zero Trust unified policy platform that centralizes administration of attribute-based policies with real-time enforcement. By automating least privilege access, it enforces data-centric security controls and compliance in real-time. Whenever an access request is made in real-time, the CloudAz policy engine, Policy Controller, evaluates the authorization policies using attribute values obtained from attribute sources as defined in policies. With a unified policy platform, the Policy Controller can enforce and consistently maintain data security measures across various applications and data systems, both on-premises and in the cloud. This solution enables access rights to be updated on the fly via policy whenever there is a change in regulatory requirements, without custom code and manual procedures, streamlining compliance and reducing the cost of security management.
Application Enforcer
NextLabs’ Application Enforcer is an out-of-the-box policy enforcer that seamlessly integrates with enterprise and cloud applications, allowing automatic enforcement of security policies across the enterprise. The enforcer secures access with policy and attribute-based access control (ABAC) by dynamically applying policies to enable least privileged access to sensitive information. NextLabs Application Enforcer for SAP and NextLabs Application Enforcer for SharePoint enforces entitlement and data security policies to provide a more granular level of information governance and access controls, ensuring that only authorized users can view, edit, create, and delete data in SAP and SharePoint. With Application Enforcer, organizations can prevent data loss and wrongful disclosure, while enabling secure collaboration and automation of data security and compliance procedures.
Data Access Enforcer (DAE) Data-Level Security Controls
NextLabs’ Data Access Enforcer (DAE) provides dynamic data-level security controls to enforce “need-to-know” data access at runtime using fine-grained attribute-based policies. DAE protects data access from anywhere by securing access and protecting critical data using real-time segregation and masking controls. With record-level dynamic data filtering, fields and records are dynamically segregated to be viewed only by authorized users who have been granted access, ensuring data protection even when the file is shared with unauthorized users. In addition, with field-level dynamic data masking, original data can be hidden with modified content to protect sensitive data from unauthorized individuals. This solution balances enterprise data access and safeguarding sensitive information to maintain data privacy, compliance, and competitiveness.
SkyDRM Digital Rights Management
NextLabs’ SkyDRM is an enterprise digital rights management (E-DRM) solution that provides persistent control of access and usage of digital information stored in files throughout its lifecycle, both in transit and at rest. SkyDRM utilizes dynamic authorization to determine access rights to documents in real-time by leveraging on data classification and user and environmental attributes. SkyDRM enables automated rights protection by using encryption, identity, and authorization policies to secure files such as Microsoft Office documents, PDF, JPG and a variety of CAD formats. Digital rights are applied automatically to files being shared and the protection stays with the files regardless of where the files are located. With SkyDRM, organizations can monitor and audit access by centrally tracking data usage across the partner network, providing increased visibility for compliance.
CloudAz Report Server
CloudAz’s Reporter Application & Report Server provides centralized audit and reporting capabilities that enable companies to streamline compliance reporting, while demonstrating compliance and simplifying the process of auditing security controls. The CloudAz server tracks and stores real-time user and data access activity across applications and services in a central audit repository, providing accountability and transparency over data usage. The audit log of all activity on CloudAz server provides insights into potential security gaps, allowing companies to take corrective actions and disclose any violations when reporting. The server includes a message feature that requires a user to validate his action when attempting to perform a risky action. This feature prevents any violation of policies and educates and train users who are unaware of the potential violation. This solution reduces the cost of compliance through more efficient and cost-effective monitoring and auditing of data access activity.
Dynamic Centralized Policy Management
NextLabs’ unified policy management platform, CloudAz, allows companies to define Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) security policies that are evaluated and enforced dynamically at that time of the access request. The policies can apply the regulatory controls applicable to the user, data, and environment in real-time.
Data-centric Security Controls
NextLabs solutions provide data-centric security controls that protect sensitive data at all times, regardless of its location. These solutions can encrypt data at rest and in transit, control data access based on policies, and apply dynamic data masking to protect sensitive data. Companies can define and enforce granular data access policies based on user roles, locations, and devices.
Automate Centralized Monitoring
CloudAz’s centralized monitoring provides real-time visibility into data activity and events. This allows organizations to monitor data access and data usage to detect potential security incidents. CloudAz can provide alerts and notifications based on security policies, enabling rapid response to security incidents.
Centralized Auditing and Reporting
CloudAz provides centralized auditing and reporting capabilities that enable companies to demonstrate compliance with regulations and ensure the integrity of their data security policies. Compliance reports can include data access, data handling, and policy enforcement. CloudAz reports also provide insights into potential security gaps, allowing companies to take corrective actions.
Automate & Prevent
With dynamic authorization and ABAC, the NextLabs CloudAz automates the enforcement of data access policies and apply preventive controls, improving data security by reflecting changes in attribute values immediately and reducing the cost of policy management. This allows enterprises to reduce the operational expenses of R&D and COGS as well as decreases the time to market.
