Microsoft 365 is a suite of cloud-based productivity and communication services that includes Microsoft Office applications (including OneNote and OneDrive) as well as other popular Microsoft tools like Skype and Teams. Microsoft 365 tools and services are at the core of many organizations’ data management and day-to-day workflows, so monitoring activity across your environment is key to making sure that these services remain secure and meet compliance standards.

In October, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) released its “2020 Staff Report Lessons Learned from Commission-Led CIP Reliability Audits.” The report summarizes the Commission’s observations from Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) audits performed in conjunction with staff from Regional Entities and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC).

Security configuration management (SCM) can help organizations do much more than just harden their attack surfaces against intrusions. This fundamental control also has the ability to make your audits flow more smoothly. Indeed, it allows organizations to pull reports from any point in time and demonstrate how their configuration changes and alignments help to support their compliance efforts.

IT compliance requirements are designed to help companies enhance their cybersecurity and integrate top-level protection into their workflows. But passing an IT security audit can be challenging. Complex requirements, constant changes in standards and laws, and audit processes, and a high number of required security procedures are the key challenges of maintaining compliance. The way out is with careful preparation and smart planning.

One question I get asked frequently is “how can I get deeper insight and audit correlation searches running inside my environment?” The first step in understanding our correlation searches, is creating a baseline of what is expected and identify what is currently enabled and running today. Content Management inside Splunk Enterprise Security is a quick way to filter on what is enabled (and it’s built into the UI and works out of the box).

During an internal International Organization for Standardization (ISO) audit, your company assesses its quality management system (QMS) to determine if it complies with ISO 9001. Companies use the ISO 9001 standard to demonstrate that they can consistently provide products and services that meet customer needs and regulatory requirements. Organizations also use ISO 9001 to demonstrate that they are continually improving their products, services, and processes.

The Slack Audit Logs API is for monitoring the audit events happening in a Slack Enterprise Grid organization to ensure continued compliance, to safeguard against any inappropriate system access, and to allow the user to audit suspicious behavior within the enterprise. This essentially means it is an API to know who did what and when in the Slack Enterprise Grid account. We are excited to announce the Slack Add-on for Splunk, that targets this API as a brand new data source for Splunk.

If you want confidence that your organization is meeting its core business goals, you need internal audits. If you want to save your organization time and money and keep everything running like a well-oiled machine, internal audits will help you get there. If you want to protect your enterprise against fraud and prevent fraudulent practices, internal audits are key.

How much do you really know about your open source usage? Can you identify what open source components you’re using? How about which licenses are in play and whether you’re compliant? Do you have a good sense of how many open source security vulnerabilities are in your code base and how to remediate them? Chances are, if you’re like most organizations, you can’t answer all of these questions.