Product Announcement: Automate CIS Benchmarks

Balbix enables organizations to automate CIS Benchmarks to streamline compliance reporting and reduce their attack surface, achieving a stronger security posture.

Security teams and CISOs leverage CIS benchmarks for best practices and configuration recommendations to ensure they proactively harden their environments. Compliance with CIS benchmarks is also necessary for meeting internal policy and audit requirements and can help organizations comply with the “secure configuration” elements of broader frameworks. However, the current methods for determining compliance can be manual and time-consuming. Often, compliance teams have to gather data about assets and vulnerabilities using a manual scanning tool or conduct assessments to map an organization’s security controls to determine if they meet compliance regulations and then compile reports in a spreadsheet. This process can take weeks or even months to complete. In addition, compliance reports often lack security risk context, reducing the value of what should be a powerful tool for proactive security posture hardening to a once-a-year checkbox exercise.

Since CIS Benchmarks help achieve compliance with key elements of several other frameworks, such as NIST and PCI-DSS, compliance teams leverage them as baseline requirements for their environments to ensure these requirements are met. Depending on the industry, non-compliance can result in significant fines and penalties and, more recently, executive accountability.

With the introduction of new regulations by SEC, there is a growing need to move away from once-a-year siloed compliance exercises to continuous risk management, compliance reporting, and visibility into ‘material’ security risks.

With Balibix, organizations have the visibility and insights needed to ensure continuous compliance with CIS Benchmarks.

Our key capabilities include:

• Automated reports: Balbix provides real-time analytics and reporting on CIS Benchmark compliance status, enabling organizations to identify and correct critical misconfigurations and meet reporting requirements quickly.
• Accurate prioritization and mitigation of compliance risk: Balbix automatically enriches compliance data with risk context, such as asset criticality, enabling organizations to implement security best practices to reduce the attack surface.
• Comprehensive cyber risk quantification: Balbix incorporates CIS Benchmark findings into its unified, data-driven risk model – enabling not only a risk-informed approach to compliance management but also a more complete picture of cybersecurity posture.

Balbix enables CIS Benchmark compliance automation by ingesting data from first & third-party tools that provide visibility across a wide variety of infrastructure configuration controls such as access controls, user rights, logging, network settings, etc. Through this data-driven approach, Balbix can ensure organizations are continuously compliant with CIS Benchmarks.

For security and compliance teams, Balbix can highlight critical assets, plus all vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and control failures associated with them. Using this information, security teams can harden their assets and reduce the risk of compromise.

Available today: CIS Benchmarks for Windows

Balbix surfaces CIS Benchmark findings in real-time for Windows, including CIS best-practice configuration recommendations and assessment findings of all passed/failed control instances in the environment – with the ability to drill into those specific policies, technologies, implementation groups, and other areas of focus.

Balbix automatically generates reports highlighting the level of CIS Benchmark compliance across your environment by technology, implementation group, software category, and severity.

Available shortly: CIS Benchmarks for AWS, Azure, GCP & Linux

To help organizations streamline compliance beyond their Windows-based assets, Balbix plans to expand its automated CIS benchmarking for AWS, Azure, and GCP. With this capability, compliance & security teams can build more secure and resilient cloud environments that contribute to a stronger security posture.

Additionally, Balbix will extend its CIS benchmarking to Linux, enabling organizations to improve their compliance management across Linux-based systems widely used in their environment, including servers, workstations & IoT devices.

Next steps

Balbix’s new capability for automating CIS benchmarks requirements and its unique 3-in-1 security solution empower security & compliance teams to keep their organizations continuously compliant. Start your journey to automating CIS benchmarks & improving your compliance posture by scheduling a 30-minute demo with Balbix.