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Virtual Security and Compliance
Virtualization Control and Optimization Portal (VCOP™)
"We need the best of breed; we need to take these diverse security tools from different vendors, normalize the data and aggregate it together to provide situational awareness."
Peter Mell, NIST, Because a Few Seconds are a Long Time in Cyberspace
On The FrontLines, V3 N5 July 2011
The benefits of moving to virtualized environments and cloud services are well documented. However, Information Assurance (IA), specifically security and compliance, continues to be one of the major risks that stand in the way of widespread adoption of these services across the Federal government. Although risk can never be completely eliminated, program managers and authorizing officials should look to manage acceptable levels of risk based on current data and information about their organization. Similarly, agencies must also find ways to reduce costs and timelines associated with collecting, analyzing and using the appropriate information for these risk-based decisions.
With this in mind, agencies need to improve efficiencies associated with collecting, using and sharing accurate, repeatable, defendable and timely data. By leveraging the information harvested through connecting agency policies to operational data, organizations become more effective and efficient with:
- Assuring security policies are implemented and maintained
- Obtaining and maintaining Authority To Operate (ATO)
- Sharing information among operations, security and compliance teams to address IA requirements and compliance mandates
- Responding to ever increasing security and compliance audit and reporting requirements
- Analyzing and troubleshooting across physical and virtual infrastructures
- Identifying responsible parties and related actions
Virtualization Control and Optimization Portal (VCOP)
VCOP is a risk management solution that provides agency-wide situational awareness, decision support, auditing, troubleshooting and reporting of IT security and compliance posture to executive, management and operational resources.
VCOP increases organizational risk awareness, improves the accuracy and timelines of FISMA reporting and reduces annual costs associated with addressing security and mandatory compliance requirements.
VCOP Key Features:
- Business centric interface
- Encompasses all NIST SP 800-53 Management, Technical and Operational security controls
- Easily configured to agency policies and risk tolerances
- Real-time control inheritance reporting and auditing
- Multi-tenancy visibility and accountability
- Leverages data from existing ecosystem
- Designed for high performance, flexibility, scalability and availability
- SLA Performance Tracking and Reporting
Virtual Security, Compliance Management and Optimization
VCOP collates, transforms and aggregates data from disparate sources across the IT ecosystem to generate browser-accessible graphical dashboards of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). This operational intelligence provides monitoring and management of business activities with near real-time situational awareness and analysis of the organization's performance.
Guident developed VCOP as an outgrowth of authoring the Department of Homeland Security Virtualization Security Best Practices as well as through consultancy with other Federal agencies' virtualization efforts. VCOP is designed to address risk management, security and compliance challenges through the use of an executive repository that consists of Mission, Program, Information Systems, Asset, Governance and Compliance data. VCOP's innovation extraction and integration engine correlates both structured and unstructured data for automated decision making and analysis capabilities.
VCOP contains pre-configured KPIs for a variety of decision support, auditing and reporting requirements related to FISMA, SANS Top 20, Federal Cloud Security Top 20, among others. Additionally, Guident works side-by-side with organizations to define and configure KPIs, data refresh frequencies and sources of operational data. Using Guident's proven business intelligence methodology, VCOP's interfaces are configured to provide quick access to real-time information about the organization's compliance with the agency's interpretation of FIPS 199, FIPS 200 and NIST SP 800-53.
In constantly changing virtualized environments, Federal authorities must have an easy means to assess risk and determine the most cost effective and secure manner to reduce risks. Among its many benefits, VCOP provides greater visibility and awareness of risks, and decreases the cost and timelines associated with Information Assurance activities.
VCOP. The answer is in the data.
Guident is a leading Business Analytics and Business Intelligence service provider with over 350 implementations for clients that include:
- Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts
- Department of Commerce
- Department of Homeland Security
- Department of Labor
- Department of State
- Department of Transportation
- Department of Treasury
- Environmental Protection Agency
- Food and Drug Administration
- Military Health System