Use BPM Software to Improve Enterprise Security

BPM software assists with developing a robust enterprise security framework by helping stakeholders collaborate. BPM also provides powerful tools for compliance with governmental and industry regulations. Improving enterprise cybersecurity requires a large coordinated effort across multiple business functions, and BPM assists with collaboration between security and business teams, assessing areas of vulnerability, and deploying secure processes and systems.

Last year’s security breach at Equifax was perhaps the biggest in US history. During Equifax's departing CEO Richard Smith’s congressional testimony, the breach was attributed to a single employee’s failure to update a software patch. Considering that Equifax maintained a security team of 225 people and a budget of $250 million, a more likely cause of the breach was a breakdown in processes that could have been addressed through Business Process Management (BPM).

BPM software helps with security assessment, deployment, and compliance monitoring

The software patching behavior of Equifax is typical to many companies and represents one of the largest areas of global security vulnerability. For this reason, most security regulations focus on timely software updates as a critical area of requirements. Through BPM, a company can implement a robust security framework that ensures that no single employee has the responsibility for making sure that software is updated correctly.

A successful deployment of BPM can boost productivity and efficiency while empowering the workforce and decreasing costs

BPM software improves corporate performance by analyzing, optimizing, and automating tasks throughout the enterprise. A successful deployment of BPM can boost productivity and efficiency while empowering the workforce and decreasing costs. When applied to cybersecurity, BPM helps companies to implement process for everything from network security to secure IoT devices.

After a holistic assessment of areas of security risk and business need, the typical BPM implementation facilitates the work of information gathering about security across the organization including areas such as impact vulnerability, likelihood of incidents, ranking of corporate risk, and prioritization of security improvements. Functional areas in need of security improvement will require their own implementation plan. Software tools in the process include the generation of matrices of risk and gaps and executive dashboards to view status and progress toward achieving tactical and strategic objectives.

Using BPM software to achieve regulatory compliance with HIPAA and PCI

After BPM software has been deployed, many aspects of security will be actively monitored across the enterprise at the executive level and functionally by stakeholders throughout the organization. The system will now support end‐to‐end traceability to determine the source of errors and problems and continually improve security performance while enforcing regulatory compliance and internal quality standards.

One of the most widely used set of regulations in private industry is for processing credit cards in accordance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). While many aspects of PCI compliance can be automated through software, there remains a large set of tasks that require human operational involvement. By embedding these processes into BPM, employees are given powerful tools to execute processes correctly and without deviation from documented protocols and policies.

Some examples of operational processes related to PCI compliance include:

• Network change policy - Every change to IT networks must be documented and diagrammed.

• Vulnerability testing - Regular scheduled scans of the network must be performed to identify potential intrusions.

• Timeline for software updates - Installation of software updates and patches must be conducted within rigidly defined time periods.

• Monitoring - Logs of digital transactions must be maintained and monitored for suspicious activity.

• Breach response - When an infiltration is detected, a documented security response must be activated and continued through resolution, with post-resolution reviews to strengthen defence against future attacks.

BPM software helps an organization to enforce policies for sensitive data while also providing comprehensive reports

For the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the requirements center around the privacy of patient data such as the encryption of data while in transit and at rest. Adhering with the encryption requirement means keeping track of every network that might be transmitting sensitive data and every place where that data might be stored, from servers to cache to logs to personal PCs and USB drives. By operationalizing those processes, BPM software helps an organization to enforce policies for sensitive data while also providing comprehensive reports for the enforcements efforts of internal staff and external auditors.

BPM software provides another big benefit by managing the tremendous amount of documentation that often must be submitted to regulatory agencies or reviewed by auditors. In many organizations, reporting on compliance requires a dedicated staff due to the great volumes of information that must be collected, organized, and managed. BPM software can add great efficiencies to the reporting effort while ensuring that reports are always up to date and accurate.

abas BPM for securing the enterprise

BPM software like abas BPM can help establish and follow business processes for functions like cybersecurity. The system provides a dashboard and customized reports for employees ranging from security department employees to business owners, subject matter experts, contracts personnel, procurement specialists, IT workers, and administrative staff. Each user of the system can view a dashboard and run custom reports such as abas Workflow User Dashboard. With little effort, detailed information can be captured about existing systems, organized within a single database, and manipulated with tools like abas BPM Designer. Data can be displayed visually for easy comprehension across business silos with tools like abas BPM Workflow Viewer.

Deploying robust security across an enterprise is seldom an easy process. By carefully applying software tools like BPM, the process can be much smoother.

More information on abas BPM can be found at https://abas-erp.com/en/products/workflow-management