When it comes to ASD top 4 compliance, most organizations think it’s easier to put off the pain. The reality is investing in top 4 compliance is far more cost effective than the alternative, dealing with a breach.

During an audit of three federal government agencies in 2018, it was highlighted that only one of them was ASD top 4 compliant. This audit was however a very small view of the issue. From audits over the last four years only 29% of agencies were compliant.

With federal government agencies being mandated to implement these controls since 2013, what’s the issue? Looking at data collected by Ivanti in 2018, this pattern also exists in the corporate world.

What’s the issue?

  • It’s just too hard nobody can do whitelisting
  • There are too many moving parts
  • Our users are unique
  • We can’t impact the users
  • The business is risk averse
  • We don’t have the resources to manage it
  • Its more consoles, agents and vendors

These are all very common statements I have heard in the 7 years I have been talking about ASD compliance with customers. However, it doesn’t have to be that way, if you choose to work with a vendor that looks at security from a different perspective you may just see why.

What makes Ivanti different?

When we talk about security at Ivanti we talk about ‘Operational Security’. We talk about how we can operationalize security and make it a core fundamental part of your approach to IT. How we can make security an enabler for IT and not a draconian control they are forced to deploy and manage at their expense and their user’s satisfaction.

All Ivanti security solutions have a top 4 of their own:

  1. Empower users don’t just restrict
  2. Low cost management overhead
  3. Be fast to rollout and realize value
  4. Continually change the game

Let’s look at those in a bit more detail:

Empower users – Often users are the last thought when it comes to how security controls affect the organization, do this at your peril. If your security controls allow users to function the way they need, in a more secure way they are less likely to work around you. Most whitelisting solutions allow or block, with Ivanti if a block happens we have multiple mechanisms to get the user working again, quickly and easily with a small disruption to their productivity.

Low management overhead – All of the Ivanti solutions have features and designs such that management overhead moving forwards is super low reducing cost. That may be in automated patch scanning and deployment with integration to your vulnerability scanner and change management system, or dynamically whitelisting any IT installed software with no manual whitelist updates. Or remote machines that never return to HQ patching themselves remotely and securely reporting back their patch status.

Fast to rollout – With limited resources both human and financial, getting ROI is important. Ivanti solutions can be stood up quickly and value realized fast. Using our patching you can be closing vulnerabilities in 20 minutes from download, it’s that quick.

Changing the game – We may not have Next Gen in the name of every one of our products, but we are changing the game and going Next Gen! Patch Intelligence from Ivanti Cloud will deliver our customers success and failure stats for patches from our global customer base, that’s over 25 million patched endpoints! This will help you build a patch strategy and mitigate risk, based on data, not guess work! This approach will help to start streamlining patch testing and the costs associated.

What is the power of one?

This year we released our Ivanti Security Controls product, this brings our customers ASD Top 4 compliance from one product, one console, one agent and one vendor. Yes, to repeat everything from one product, one console, one agent and one vendor. The power of one!

This brings our customers those top 4 Ivanti principles when deploying the ASD top 4 security controls.

The power of one allows our customers to have fewer management points and technologies to support, helping to reduce overhead and training requirements. Better integration between the capabilities to provide more value and a lighter footprint on the endpoint. Faster deployments to reduce project costs and get protection faster.  Wrapping all this is working with one vendor, reducing the cost of software, simplifying support procedures and only having to manage one vendor relationship.

For more information on how Ivanti can help you implement the ASD top 4 security controls take a look at the home page, or if your are ready to start your journey download a free trial.