Software, hardware and procedural compliance

By Milica D. Djekic

The good software and hardware configuration, as well as the adequately written procedures and policies, are crucially important for the cyber defense of any IT infrastructure. By well-developed procedures and policies, we mean a set of rules and principles that could guide us to follow the best practice and cope with the legal regulations, frameworks, and standards. There are plenty of standards and frameworks that would deal with cybersecurity and the expert’s  community would always strive to meet those requirements. It’s not always easy to make the good configuration of your IT asset and well as enforce your employees to operate as suggested.

The well-organized people, processes, and technologies are from vital importance to productivity, safety, security, and effectiveness of any working unit. It’s well-known that time means money and if you want to follow that rule  – you need to try to avoid any discontinuity in your business. Once you get your IT devices and network being well-configured and in compliance with all the standards, demands and regulations, you could count on the good business continuity as well as the appropriate readiness to the incident response. So, could we anyhow correlate the business continuity and disaster recovery with the cybersecurity compliance?

The answer to this question is mainly yes In other words, before you establish any IT  system, you need to invest a certain time and effort to do some kinds of preparations for so. Many cyber defense professionals would agree that you need good skill in order to start your IT infrastructure to work well for you. On the other hand, if we talk about business continuity and disaster recovery, it’s well-known that the perfect set up assets and well-enforced procedures and policies could play a crucial role in the both – time and cost-effectiveness. For such a reason, it’s strategically significant to pay attention to cyber defense compliance getting with so the good software, hardware, and procedural adjustments.

We could begin with software compliance! First, let’s explain what it is and why it matters. The software compliance is any sort of adjustment in terms of your computer programs and operating systems that should get in compliance with your hardware capacities as well as IT standards and legal regulations. Many software developers would know that they need to follow strict guidelines in order to produce their solutions. Those products would necessarily cope with intellectual property laws and rights. As we know,  there would be several well- dominated operating systems in the world as well as the heaps of programming languages that would offer a chance to create the code. Why is this so important? Well, if you want to develop an application for the certain operating systems,  you would get the limited numbers of tools to do so. All those tools and operating systems would cope with IT standardization and they would offer you an opportunity to deal only under such constraints.

Also, if you want to install already developed software on your device, you should know that you cannot do everything you want and in such a case, you would need to follow some rules. You would agree with us that if you try to set up on your machine two programs being incompatible with each other, you could cause some business discontinuity – because your entire operating system may crash and you could lose plenty of sensitive information in case you do not mind about your back up procedures. In other words, this could affect your disaster recovery process and put a great risk to your private or business asset. In addition, it’s good to know that any software or operating system you use should deal with the license. In case you use the piracy

The product, you should know that you are breaking the law as well as you are doing the highly risky stuff for a reason the majority of piracy things would work with the flaws which can hugely affect your cybersecurity, too.

Next, if we think about the hardware compliance, we should know that the engineers and technicians setting up the hardware components must deal with the best possible compliance skills. In the practice, they would use plenty of hardware parts to make some computer or network configuration and you would agree with us – that would require a good amount of knowledge and experience. In other words, you should get aware of that the hardware pieces should get in compliance with each other in case you want to make the whole and the experience would suggest that the engineers doing such a task should understand the technical documentation being written to any of those components. So  commonly, the technical team would do some research on the web and contact many vendors in order to get the first-hand information and once they realize they can configure a device  or  network out of those parts – they would purchase those solutions  and  in the best feasible case, they would make no mistakes which means they would make no additional costs to their employer. As it’s  quite obvious, the skill means money as well

Finally, we would say some words about the procedural compliance. In the practice, it’s essentially important to get well-developed procedures andolicies that would satisfy the needs of your employer and make your cyber experience being more convenient and safe. Making the procedures and policies seeks a lot of experience and expertise and in the practice, only the senior level IT professionals could get capable to obtain such a demanding task. Practically, the policies and procedures should get clearly written and understandable to their users and they should also be time effective because they cannot represent the additional load that would pull the entire working process back.  Also, the policies and procedures must be in compliance with the ongoing standards, laws, and regulations. Any change in such a manner should bring the better and better update to the existing procedures and policies. Additionally, the procedural compliance should cope with the good understanding of a working process for a reason that could support the employer’s demands in terms of the best possible practice being followed as well as the best possible business continuity and disaster recovery plans being applied.

The purpose of this effort is to provide a closer look to software, hardware, and procedural compliance as well as try to illustrate why those pillars mean in the practice. Through our research, we also have tried to correlate those compliance requirements with more practical cybersecurity topics such as business continuity and disaster recovery strategies. The special point has been put to the challenges regarding the time and cost effectiveness of IT infrastructure and its operations.

About the Author

A thoughtful and frequent contributor to Cyber  Defense Magazine, Milica Djekic graduated at the Department of Control Engineering at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, she’s been an engineer with a passion for cryptography, cybersecurity, and wireless systems. Milica is a researcher from Subotica, Serbia. She also serves as a Reviewer at the Journal of Computer Sciences and Applications and.  She writes for American and Asia-Pacific security magazines. She is a volunteer with the American corner of Subotica as well as a lecturer with the local engineering society.