Using CIS Benchmarks in Cloudhouse Guardian
What is Cloudhouse Guardian?
Cloudhouse Guardian is designed to help you keep on top of monitoring your IT infrastructure and ensuring everything is compliant. It allows you to track and discover changes and ensure your estate complies with policies.
It does this by scanning the entire estate – servers, desktops, laptops, boundary devices, network infrastructure, storage and cloud platforms – and detecting and tracking the configuration of each component.
This data provides a single pane of glass through which you can see accurate configuration data across the whole of IT, from endpoints, servers, network and cloud to logical items such as security groups and AWS S3 buckets.
Cloudhouse Guardian identifies if systems are configured correctly, and when a change has taken a system out of compliance with your policies. With this valuable insight, you can manage configuration drift, for example ensuring that your DR site stays consistent with your production configuration.
CIS Benchmarks
And that’s not all: with Guardian scanning in place, it is simple to add industry standard CIS Benchmark scanning, ensuring your estate is compliant with best practice for secure configuration.
The Centre for Internet Security provides a fantastic range of best-in-class benchmarks or configuration guidelines for IT components. These benchmarks provide detailed guidance to safeguard your systems against cyber threats – you can read more about them here: https://www.cisecurity.org/cis-benchmarks/
Cloudhouse Guardian Benchmark scanning allows you to scan elements of your estate against these Benchmarks.
How to implement Benchmark scanning
Withing Cloudhouse Guardian, you can access Benchmarks on the left of the screen here:
You can then attach a Benchmark policy to a Node Group, for example a group of Active Directory Servers, and Guardian will scan the nodes for compliance with the Benchmark.
Guardian ships with a lot of CIS Benchmarks out of the box, covering many different types of devices:
The CIS Benchmarks include a lot of recommended changes to improve security (also known as “hardening”), so please be aware that if you have not already hardened your servers and are running in a default configuration, you can expect to see a LOT of red in the report!
This image shows output from a Guardian CIS Benchmark Report:
When you drill down further into a report, the results include details of all benchmark tests and recommendations on how to remedy any issues identified:
The CIS Benchmarks tool is a fantastic way to apply industry best practice to your environment, and this functionality is included free for all Guardian users.
If you are already using Guardian, but haven’t yet explored the Benchmark tool, why not check it out and see what you find? Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or want to discuss how to get the most value from this capability.
And if you are not a Guardian subscriber but would like to find out more about how it can help to ensure your organisation remains compliant and secure, contact us for a no-obligation chat. You can also learn more about Cloudhouse Guardian on our website here: Cloudhouse Guardian.
