The Schellman Blog

[NOTE: Schellman has since updated this content in a more recent article.] Think of your auditing firm like you would a long-term business partner. They are someone you will work with year after year, and they will be an integral part of setting the stage for your organization’s success. As such, the act of selecting the appropriate assessor shouldn’t be taken lightly. Here are several key qualities your organization should look for when choosing an auditing firm:

According to a study by Ponemon Institute, companies that had data breaches involving less than 10,000 records had an average cost of data breach of $4.7 million and those companies with the loss or theft of more than 50,000 records had a cost of data breach of $11.9 million.

Effective compliance and risk management goes far beyond a set of policies. To be effective, a company’s compliance and risk management program must be embedded in its culture. All too often, companies see compliance as a separate activity that does not need to be integrated into the day-to-day business operations. All employees should share responsibility, and an intelligent risk framework should be created that brings compliance out in the open — letting employees know the importance of compliance while allowing them to communicate. But that’s often easier said than done.

Despite years of preparation and billions of dollars in spending, today’s businesses still aren’t prepared for cyber-attacks. Just turn on the evening news and you’ll be greeted with the name of the latest company to suffer an attack.

The more advanced technology gets, the more chief information security officers have to worry about. And with hackers waging significant wars on major organizations like JPMorgan Chase and Anthem, their job has become more important than ever.

Overview In the last 30 days, the FedRAMP Program Management Office (PMO) has published guidance for both vulnerability scanning and penetration testing. The updated guidance comes on the heels of PCI mandating the enhanced penetration testing requirements within its requirement 11.3 as part of the 3.0, now 3.1, version of the DSS. These augmented PCI requirements, introduced in the fall of 2013, took effect on June 30th. For many cloud service providers this means the requirements for vulnerability scanning and penetration testing are more thorough and will require additional resources for planning, executing and remediating findings. This article will walk through the updates and discuss the differentiation between FedRAMP and the PCI Data Security Standard (DSS).

Periodic reviews of system access are critical for service organizations who wish to maintain strong internal control around information security. Access privileges to systems or physical locations that impact the customer’s business environment should be commensurate with the requirements of the services provided. These privileges should also facilitate segregation of incompatible duties. For example, in order to segregate incompatible duties, a system developer generally should not also have access to migrate changes to the production environment.