NERC CIP Compliance, Real-Time Automation

NERC CIP is a set of operational standards for entities deemed critical to the bulk power system (BPS). BPS organizations includes reliability coordinators, balancing and interchange authorities, transmission and generation providers, owners, operators and users of the assets. Asset security is measured through risk assessments and audits on best practices and documented standards, compliance enforcement, and the procedures regarding distribution of critical information.

Traditionally, maintaining and demonstrating compliance with NERC CIP involves manual collection of evidence. People spend hours collecting and documenting human activity, business processes, policies, and snapshots of limited technical data. Yet weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual vulnerability scans and configurations really don’t do much for operational security. Nonetheless, NERC CIP can add operational security value if measured using real-time data.

As a native Splunk powered solution, Q-Compliance solves the problem of manual compliance efforts using a data-driven approach. Splunk is the best solution for ingesting data and providing visibility in near real-time. Additionally, by applying a compliance lens to near real-time data being ingested across your enterprise, Q-Compliance automatically assesses it against the NERC CIP controls. In short, data is complicated and hard to contextualize. But this is where Qmulos excels.

Simply put, Q-Compliance is purpose-built to help you streamline and automate complex cybersecurity auditing and compliance requirements. Moreover, Q-Compliance includes NERC CIP automation, but also NIST 800-53, CMMC, HIPAA, and many others. By selecting the NERC CIP dashboard (or another), you can track how your organization and systems are scoring against each of the control categories, thereby highlighting areas for improvement. The dashboard also provides the ability to quickly drill into specific domains to view compliance against the capabilities, practices and processes. You can then drill into individual controls to see the specific systems, events, and assets that are non-compliant.

Q-Compliance also gives the user the ability to upload policy, procedure and file evidence as well as automatically log human activity. It is specifically designed to keep audit evidence all in one place, making compliance efforts more organized and efficient. Additionally, Q-Compliance aligns specific security controls with the NERC standards to use real-time log and event data from Splunk, enabling automation of the assessment and scoring of your organization’s practices against NERC CIP. Furthermore, we codified industry best practices into the workflow of the solution. This approach helps your organization institutionalize and optimize the processes that improve your cyber posture and protect critical cyber assets.

The Journey to Compliance Automation Starts Here

Regardless of your organizations maturity with the NERC CIP controls, Qmulos has you covered. With near immediate return on investment, Q-Compliance gets you started quickly and grows with you as your capabilities evolve. Click here to download our NERC CIP white paper and find out how Q-Compliance will benefit your organization.