What is Continuous Controls Monitoring?

Critical Security Controls (CSCs) are a recommended set of actions for cybersecurity that provide ways to help prevent and stop attacks on critical data and systems. Nearly every cybersecurity practitioner is working to implement and improve their implementation of security controls. Compliance requirements are increasingly putting sharper teeth behind the implementation of such controls in an effort to elevate security preparedness, responsiveness, and resilience. However, how do enterprise executives know if the security controls that are implemented are doing what they believe they are doing?

For many enterprises, they don’t. Malicious actors know this, which is why targeting misconfigured tools and other tactics are considered to be an Achilles heel for cyber attacks. This has given rise to an essential need for continuous controls monitoring (CCM)- formally Cyber Observer. Gartner defines CCM as a set of technologies that reduces business losses and audit costs through continuous monitoring and auditing of the controls in applications. Most organizations implement dozens of security and related IT tools to protect their business and manage risk. But verifying that those tools are configured correctly, aligned with security frameworks and standards, and performing as expected is extremely difficult and time consuming.

CCM tools provide comprehensive, real-time visibility into cybersecurity posture. Such tools enable enterprise executives to get ahead of security issues before controls incidents become major security and business incidents. The value and payoff is significant – in terms of risk reduction, productivity gains, and cost avoidance.

Unlike other CCM solutions, our solution continuously retrieves and analyzes more than 5,000 CSCs from more than 80 tools to enhance risk posture management and facilitate compliance. Designed for CISOs and senior InfoSec managers (CIOs, C-level managers, Risk Officers, SOC managers and IT Infrastructure personnel) and fully deployed within an enterprise in a few hours, XM Cyber empowers leadership with a unified dashboard of their entire cyber security ecosystem. This enables them to easily identify weaknesses, reduce mean-time-to-detect (MTTD), prevent breaches, and advance organizational cyber ecurity posture and maturity.