Using Cisco Controllers to Meet Financial Regulatory Requirements

This weblog will discover how monetary establishments (FIs) can use completely different Cisco applied sciences to assist meet regulatory necessities, be they FFIEC, OCC, PCI, or others. Prior blogs on this collection enumerated on the regulatory our bodies and rules, in addition to how organizations can reside in a multi-controller world. That is elementary to the various know-how necessities seen throughout an IT group’s span of management. This weblog will deal with among the capabilities WITHIN every of those controllers, and the way they can assist resolve the challenges confronted inside their respective domains. Of observe is all of those applied sciences expose the northbound API which might enable for multi-domain orchestration, and multi-domain orchestration instruments that leverage these instruments had been evaluated within the prior weblog.

Throughout these regulatory audit standards quite a lot of elementary constructs stay constant. These key tones permeate the steerage that Cisco applied sciences can assist with are with the ability to

• know your atmosphere,
• patch your atmosphere, and
• phase and safe delicate information in your atmosphere

Particular inside some rules, you’ll find superior steerage on evolving applied sciences, particularly with the 2021 replace to the FFIEC operations ebook. These rules will proceed to evolve, and with the ability to harness the facility of the automation methods can save organizations operational prices in assembly them.

Cisco DNA Heart

Cisco DNA Heart is a robust community controller and administration dashboard that permits you to take cost of your community, optimize your Cisco funding, safe your distant workforce, and decrease your IT spending. It gives a spread of advantages for FIs, together with serving to them meet regulatory necessities via its intensive automation capabilities. These advantages embody:

1. Community Segmentation: One of many key regulatory necessities for FIs is to make sure community segmentation to isolate delicate information and methods. Cisco DNA Heart can assist with the provisioning of SDA or different applied sciences (L3 and L2) constantly throughout the atmosphere.
2. Visibility and Management: Cisco DNA Heart can present the flexibility to centralize and filter on occasions and supply superior analytics.
3. Compliance Reporting: FIs are required to keep up compliance studies to reveal their adherence to regulatory necessities. Cisco DNA Heart gives compliance studies that may be simply generated and shared with regulators.
4. Automation and Orchestration: Cisco DNA Heart automates community administration duties similar to configuration administration, gadget provisioning, and community coverage enforcement. By means of superior composite templates, configlets for options could be stitched collectively throughout gadgets and gadget sorts in order that consistency could be maintained for the various options that exist in an enterprise community.
5. Enhanced Safety: By means of superior options like integration with Talos and endpoint classification, in addition to automated workflows for the provisioning of superior safety sources like encrypted visitors analytics, DNA Heart helps FIs implement the insurance policies to satisfy their regulatory necessities.

Cisco SD-WAN

Cisco SD-WAN is a cloud-delivered or on-premise managed software-defined wide-area community answer that allows FIs to attach any person to any software. It has built-in capabilities similar to multicloud, safety, enhanced visibility, and analytics constructing towards a Safe Entry Service Edge (SASE)-enabled structure. Some capabilities Cisco’s SD-WAN answer can assist with embody:

1. Community Segmentation: Provisioning safe segmentation and simplifying complicated topologies is likely one of the strengths of the Cisco SD-WAN answer. It might assist FIs to declaratively and systematically isolate delicate information and methods. That is intrinsic to the overlay and naturally can prolong the campus to the info heart and cloud utilizing requirements based mostly segmentation constructs.
2. Safe Connectivity: One of many improvements Cisco SD-WAN delivered to market was the wedding of the routing topology with the encryption overlay to scale back the standard complexity round managing each individually. It makes use of patented improvements round safe key distribution to facilitate an automatic overlay which might safe any workload from any endpoint to any cloud utilizing software conscious routing.
3. Compliance Reporting: Cisco SD-WAN is a PCI compliant answer that can be utilized to assist FIs meet their compliance wants. PCI-DSS studies can be found and could be shared with regulators.
4. Automation and Orchestration: Cisco SD-WAN automates community administration duties similar to configuration administration, gadget provisioning, and community coverage enforcement, lowering the danger of errors and inconsistencies that may result in compliance violations.
5. Enhanced Safety: Cisco SD-WAN gives superior safety features similar to menace detection and response, application-level safety, and entry management, which can assist FIs meet regulatory necessities round information safety.

Cisco Meraki

Cisco Meraki is the world main cloud-managed networking answer that gives the total stack of enterprise merchandise managed constantly through centralized administration of community gadgets and functions. It gives a spread of advantages for FIs, together with serving to them meet regulatory necessities. A few of the advantages of Cisco Meraki for FIs on this regard embody:

1. Cloud Administration: With a PCI and GPDR compliant cloud administration answer, FIs can safely handle their community infrastructure from a single cloud-based dashboard. The intuitive skill to quickly provision and preserve massive networks to incorporate SD-WAN, switching, wi-fi, sensors and cameras, and constantly and in accordance with predefined requirements, prevents configuration drift and inherent threat. The native API permits simple integration with present safety instruments and methods for auditing and validation.
2. Community Segmentation: Cisco Meraki helps intrinsic and simplified SD-WAN at low complexity to make a straightforward to keep up, safe, and audit atmosphere. It has the flexibility to do full stack safety marrying the wi-fi SSID to Layer 2 change segmentation and preserving that via the SD-WAN answer, presenting this all in a single elegant answer.
3. Compliance Reporting: FIs are required to keep up compliance studies to reveal their adherence to regulatory necessities. Cisco Meraki gives compliance studies that may be simply generated and shared with regulators.
4. Superior Safety: Cisco Meraki gives superior safety features similar to menace detection and response, content material filtering, and entry management, which can assist FIs meet regulatory necessities round information safety.

Cisco ACI

Cisco Utility Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is a software-defined networking answer that gives centralized automation and policy-driven software profiles for information heart networking. It gives a spread of advantages for FIs, together with serving to them meet regulatory necessities. A few of the advantages of Cisco ACI for FIs on this regard embody:

1. Community Segmentation: Implicit in ACI is the assemble of software based mostly consciousness and segmentation into requirements based mostly group coverage. This allows a framework for macro and micro-segmentation utilizing conventional community based mostly constructs or extra superior software classification. By means of utilizing a mannequin pushed strategy to segmentation it permits FIs to make sure that segmentation constructs are constant throughout a category of functions and enforced both in ASIC or through service home equipment stitched into the community cloth.
2. Compliance Reporting: As a part of Cisco’s reference design for safe information facilities ACI affords the flexibility to report on {hardware} and software program variations in addition to safety constructs used throughout the cloth both through native instruments, or via created toolkits, and even via third-party audit options.
3. Automation and Orchestration: Cisco ACI was constructed from the highest down as a mannequin pushed orchestration platform to permit all constructs of the community to be programmed and orchestrated as objects within the mannequin. ACI has implicit automation and orchestration, and exposes all this performance through API to permit third-party merchandise to seamlessly match into the answer.
4.  Enhanced Safety: Cisco ACI gives superior safety features similar to community segmentation, policy-based entry management, and menace detection and response, which can assist monetary establishments meet regulatory necessities round information safety.
5. Scalability and Efficiency: Cisco ACI has line charge efficiency and distinctive scalability to satisfy essentially the most demanding environments. Evolutions similar to multi-pod and multi-site enable materials to not solely span geography however will increase scalability by permitting mobility between a number of availability zones.

In Conclusion

The FFIEC weblog collection has been targeted round summarizing and evaluating the regulatory atmosphere confronted by IT organizations via the lens of the way it impacts these organizations, and corresponding applied sciences to assist. In my 15 years serving the monetary companies area, the regulatory world has solely gotten more difficult, however that is as a result of actual world threat and evolution of industrialization of the menace panorama into viable and worthwhile enterprise fashions. The extent of technical threat confronted by FIs is at an all time excessive and can proceed to evolve as long as FIs are “the place the cash is.” The regulatory atmosphere doesn’t resolve this however is an try to make sure some stage of management and consistency. To assist meet these necessities Cisco has invested billions of {dollars} into the safety and into the safety of our platforms.

The extensibility of those platforms right into a northbound API permits for one of the best at school performance of all these methods from the campus to the WAN, whereas having the ability interoperate utilizing requirements based mostly protocols and apply a multi-domain coverage. This strategy promotes flexibility and performance with out compromise, serving to organizations unlock the utmost potential of their investments to unravel their present and future enterprise issues.

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