In Q2 2024, Check Point Research reported a 30% year-over-year increase in global cyber attacks — the highest increase of global cyber attacks seen in the last two years. This rise in attacks underscores the need for robust and effective security controls.

Due to both the growing sophistication and persistence of threat actors, organizations must ensure that their security controls are not only in place but also continuously effective.

This is where Continuous Control Monitoring (CCM) comes into play. CCM provides organizations with the tools and processes needed to maintain real-time oversight of their controls, enabling them to ensure ongoing effectiveness and proactively address risks.

In this blog post, we’ll explore what continuous control monitoring is, its benefits, how to implement it, and more.

What is continuous control monitoring (CCM)?

Continuous Control Monitoring (CCM) is the process of continuously assessing, analyzing, and reporting on an organization’s security controls to ensure they operate effectively. Instead of relying solely on periodic assessments, CCM provides real-time or near-real-time insights into the health and performance of controls. This proactive approach helps organizations quickly identify and mitigate potential risks before they escalate into significant issues.

CCM involves the use of automated tools and technologies that continuously monitor, report, and alert on controls across various systems, networks, and processes. This ongoing surveillance ensures that the controls remain effective over time and adapt to any changes in the environment, such as new threats, vulnerabilities, or regulatory requirements.

Benefits of continuous control monitoring

Continuous control monitoring offers numerous benefits that can significantly enhance an organization’s security posture and operational and cost efficiency. Here’s a breakdown of the key advantages that CCM brings to the table.

• Enhanced risk management decisions: CCM enables organizations to maintain ongoing awareness of information security, vulnerabilities, and threats so they can identify and address risks as they emerge, reducing the likelihood of security incidents. This real-time visibility facilitates risk-based decision making, enabling informed decisions about risk management and resource allocation, like whether they need to make adjustments to security requirements or individual controls.
• Enhanced compliance: Many regulations and industry standards such as FedRAMP require continuous monitoring. By continuously monitoring controls, organizations can maintain continuous compliance with these regulatory requirements and industry standards. They can also ensure that compliance gaps are identified and remediated promptly and not just right before or during point-in-time audits.
• Improved efficiency: Automated CCM processes reduce the need for constant or year-round manual control testing and assessment, freeing up valuable resources. This efficiency allows organizations to focus on other critical areas of their operations while maintaining robust security controls.
• Unlocked cost savings: The automation of control monitoring reduces the labor costs associated with manual control assessments. CCM also helps prevent security incidents and compliance violations, which can lead to significant cost savings as well.

To further illustrate the benefits of CCM, let’s delve into some real-world examples and use cases.

Continuous control monitoring examples

The scenarios below will demonstrate how continuous control monitoring can be applied across different industries to address specific security challenges and improve overall control effectiveness.

• Government: Government agencies can leverage CCM to monitor security controls across their IT infrastructure continuously. CCM and monthly reporting on activities like threat intelligence and vulnerability scanning is required by FedRAMP to help ensure government agencies' security posture remains strong and can adapt to new or evolving threats.  
• Financial Services: Financial institutions can use CCM to monitor transaction processing controls continuously. By doing so, these organizations can quickly detect and respond to suspicious activities, such as unauthorized transactions or potential fraud.
• Healthcare: Healthcare providers can implement CCM to monitor access controls for electronic health records (EHRs). This ensures that only authorized personnel have access to sensitive patient information, helping to prevent data breaches and maintain compliance with healthcare regulations.
• Manufacturing: Manufacturing companies can utilize CCM to monitor its supply chain controls. Continuous monitoring helps these organizations detect any disruptions or deviations in the supply chain, allowing for timely interventions and minimizing the impact on production.
• Retail: Retail companies can implement CCM to monitor its point-of-sale (POS) systems for security controls. Continuous monitoring helps retail companies identify potential vulnerabilities in real time, such as unpatched software or unauthorized access, reducing the risk of data breaches.

Now that you understand the benefits and use cases of CCM, let’s walk through how to implement it within your organization.

How to implement continuous control monitoring

Implementing CCM may seem daunting to do on your own. To help, we’ve defined the key steps involved in implementing an effective CCM strategy.

1. Identify and prioritize controls to monitor

Begin by identifying a set of processes that can be monitored using automated tools. These are typically processes related to high-risk areas, such as access management, data protection, and network security. To identify these processes and related controls, you can look at previous internal audits and self-assessments. You can also look at applicable control frameworks like ISO 27001, NIST CSF 2.0, PCI DSS, CMMC, NIST 800-53, FedRAMP, CIS Critical Security Controls® based on your industry.  

As stated in NIST Special Publication 800-137, it is impractical to test and assess every aspect of every security control deployed across an organization at all times. So once you’ve identified these controls, you can prioritize the ones that need to be monitored most frequently (eg. hourly, daily, monthly, quarterly, annually).

When deciding which controls to prioritize, consider their risk rating and ease of implementation. Ease of implementation can be assessed in two ways:

• Is data readily available from the systems used to implement that control?
• Does that control already have an aspect of monitoring and reporting?

2. Determine the control objectives

Next, you want to determine the objective, or primary function, for each control. This is key to assessing its performance. When defining these objectives, you can use internal data (like internal audits, risk appetite, business objectives) or external frameworks like you did in the first step. 

For example, say you have a control in place about managing changes to IT systems. The objective may be to minimize the likelihood of disruption, unauthorized alterations, and errors. 

3. Establish metrics or automated tests

Next, define specific metrics (like key risk indicators) or set up automated tests that will trigger alerts when controls deviate from the expected performance. These metrics or tests should be aligned with the organization’s risk tolerance and compliance requirements.

For example, you may have a control in place to perform vulnerability scanning on production infrastructure systems, and remediate identified deficiencies on a timely basis. To assess the performance of this control, you may establish metrics or automated tests against how many vulnerabilities are being detected and remediated on a monthly basis, for example, based on the framework you’re pursuing. 

Many frameworks like ISO 27001, PCI DSS, NIST 800-53, and SOC 2 have requirements around how, when, and what type of vulnerability scanning should be done. If pursuing PCI DSS compliance, for example, this scan must be done by an Approved Scanning Vendor (ASV) on a quarterly basis. For NIST 800-53 High and NYDFS, you should be using a tool for automated scanning.

If an organization does have this evidence in place, then the test or metric would be positive. Note that tests usually use the pass/fail format to reflect whether a control objective was met or not met.

4. Create a process for managing the alerts

The final step of CCM implementation is to set up a system for managing and tracking alerts, notifying the appropriate personnel, and addressing any control deficiencies. You will need to track any issues, vulnerabilities, or risks and outline remediation actions for failing controls ahead of time to ensure that you can respond and resolve any issues quickly. 

5. Regularly review and update

Continuously review and update your CCM process to adapt to changes in the organization’s environment, such as new threats, business processes, or regulatory requirements. Regular updates ensure that the monitoring remains effective over time.

Now that you understand the implementation process, let’s take a closer look at how a compliance automation platform can significantly simplify CCM and maximize the ROI of this process. 

How a compliance automation platform simplifies CCM implementation

A compliance automation platform automates the continuous monitoring process, making it more cost-effective, consistent, and efficient. 

To start, a compliance automation platform provides pre-built controls that are mapped to applicable framework requirements. You can use these controls or create custom ones if you have unique or industry-specific framework requirements. This platform will act as a single source of truth for all your controls. 

Once you set up integrations with tools and applications that are being used across your organization, the platform will automatically collect evidence and map that evidence to framework requirements and controls via tests. These tests will be passing or failing to indicate the health of your controls. Then the platform will report on the continuous monitoring status to the appropriate personnel ensuring that stakeholders are keyed in on the ongoing status of organization’s continuous monitoring efforts 

When a test fails, the platform then sends an alert along with instructions to remediate the issue. This helps your organization quickly fix cybersecurity issues and speed up time-to-compliance. 

Why choose Secureframe for continuous control monitoring

Implementing continuous control monitoring has the potential to be complex and resource-intensive. However, organizations can automate this process with Secureframe, ensuring that their controls are continuously monitored and risks are mitigated in real time.

Secureframe offers a robust continuous monitoring solution that allows organizations to stay compliant, manage risks proactively, and focus on what matters most: growing their business securely. Customers choose us because of our:

• Breadth and depth of integrations: Connect to our 220+ integrations to pull in all the compliance data you need (not just usernames and email addresses) and continuously monitor your tech stack.
• Dashboards and notifications: Dashboards and real-time continuous monitoring via integrations notify you of failing tests and vulnerabilities in your infrastructure.
• AI-powered remediation: Use Comply AI for Remediation to quickly fix failing controls using AI-tailored remediation code, reducing the risk of human error and improving speed and accuracy when fixing misconfigurations. 
• Unmatched framework support: Monitor any custom or pre-built controls and tests that map to 40+ security and privacy frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS 4.0, NIST CSF 2.0, CPRA, TX-RAMP 3.0, CMMC 2.0, and ISO 42001. 
• Customizable notifications: Customize notifications for ongoing tasks such as user access reviews, employee policy acceptance, security awareness training, and annual penetration testing, and many more things.
• Seamless task creation and tracking: Create Slack and Jira tasks and notifications directly within the platform, assign an owner and a due date, and even choose the preferred notification delivery method, be it email, Jira, or Slack to accelerate response time to failing controls and streamline collaboration.
• Automated vulnerability scanning: Conduct automatic vulnerability scanning for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs).

As a result of Secureframe’s continuous monitoring and other automation capabilities, Secureframe users reported a range of benefits including:

• Saved time and resources obtaining and maintaining compliance (95%)
• Improved visibility into security and compliance posture (71%)
• Reduced costs associated with a compliance program (50%)

To learn why 84% of Secureframe users reported continuous monitoring to detect and remediate misconfigurations as one of the most important features, schedule a demo with a product expert.

About the UserEvidence Survey

The data about Secureframe users was obtained through an online survey conducted by UserEvidence in February 2024. The survey included responses from 44 Secureframe users (the majority of whom were manager-level or above) across the information technology, consumer discretionary, industrials, financial, and healthcare industries.