How Tufin Enables a Culture of Continuous Compliance Through Automation and AI.

Users and customers alike request access to information and applications from all over the world and on every type of network. As a result, companies’ networks and access controls constantly change and grant or deny access, making it crucial to adhere to regulatory compliance requirements and internal network compliance policies. 

Organizations, their IT leaders, and network security administrators need to instantly communicate with firewalls, routers, cloud virtual machines, and other network endpoints to determine whether those devices are still compliant.  

Tufin helps organizations immediately notify network security administrators when they are out of compliance with policies so they can mitigate policy violations. To remain continuously compliant and build a scalable and resilient network, organizations need to automate access changes automatically while ensuring potential risks and policy violations are detected before implementing changes. 

How Tufin’s Automation Streamlines Network Access Compliance  

Tufin Orchestration Suite and one of its key components, the Unified Security Policy (USP), automates access change management and detects policy noncompliance before implementing network access changes.  

The USP lets organizations centrally manage policy violations and exceptions for continuous compliance, risk management, and streamlining operations. When leveraging Tufin’s USP with its change automation workflows, this occurs seamlessly without the need for continuous human involvement (and inevitable human errors). 

Only with automation can organizations effectively keep up with the volume of requests for data and access requests and ensure compliance with access changes. 

Picture a world without automation:  

• A developer needs to access a regulated database and generate a ticket within IT.  

• Then, the person managing the ticket asks a staff member in DevOps or the network security team to grant access to the developer.  

• After that, they need to determine whether the developer should be granted access based on the appropriate policies and network segmentation rules. 

• If access is granted, the staff member needs to determine, within their complex network environment, which changes need to be made to ensure the developer can access only the specific dataset and nothing more.  

In large organizations, these requests happen hundreds of times daily.  

Tufin’s approach automatically checks network access requests to determine if they will lead to compliance violations. It allows admins to grant or deny access based on specific policy requirements, such as with PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) 4.0 with accessing customers’ credit card information databases. If access is granted, Tufin does so with the frame of least-privileged access, granting users access to only the data they need.    

Tufin makes this easy with the Orchestration Suite’s matrix-like graphical user interface and the ability to track and maintain the desired network segmentation to remain compliant. The USP simplifies how network admins manage and define access privileges and which users can connect with specific databases or applications. This can be updated dynamically and with ready-made templates for different regulatory standards, including PCI DSS 4, NIST, HIPAA, etc.  

TufinMate Streamlines Network Access Questions and Security  

Another way that Tufin is making it easier to maintain a culture of continuous compliance is through the recent launch of TufinMate. This AI-powered chatbot assistant helps you troubleshoot network access issues across hybrid and multi-vendor network environments.  

TufinMate, which is integrated into Microsoft Teams, allows users to: 

• Ask and receive answers in natural language to questions about network access flows. 

• Answer permission queries. 

• Enforce least-privilege protocols by restricting access to more granular details. 

• Provide a PDF topology map for specific paths. 

• Request through SecureChange to automate network access change, sequentially evaluating the risk of the particular network change request when needed. 

Additionally, TufinMate allows overburdened network security staff to offload frontline management of network access requests to help desks so that they can work on more complex tasks. Network security analysts will still approve or deny access requests, but automation will help streamline operations.  

TufinMate can automatically create tickets related to access requests that might put your organization out of compliance and then contact users once those tickets are resolved.   

Conclusion  

Through automation and Tufin’s unique approach to network security, Tufin allows you to foster and maintain a culture of continuous compliance. Tufin’s Orchestration Suite automates network access changes and ensures that network devices are always compliant and that policies are being adhered to.  

With the launch of TufinMate, organizations now have access to an AI-assisted chatbot to process network access questions and streamline resolution for security teams. And this is just the beginning of Tufin’s use of AI to help secure networks and remain in continuous compliance.