In today’s complex IT environments, ensuring proper and consistent device and application configurations across an entire enterprise is a major challenge. Misconfigurations and unpatched vulnerabilities open the door to cyberattacks and data breaches. Organizations need an efficient way to assess their configurations at scale against best practices and quickly identify issues. This is where MicroSolved’s MachineTruth: Global Configuration Assessment comes in.

MachineTruth is a proprietary analytics and machine learning platform that enables organizations to review their device and application configurations en masse. It compares these configs against industry standards, known vulnerabilities, and common misconfigurations to surface potential issues and ensure consistency of controls across the enterprise. Let’s take a closer look at the key features and benefits of this powerful assessment.

Comprehensive Config Analysis at Scale

One of the core capabilities of MachineTruth is its ability to ingest and analyze a huge volume of textual configuration files from an organization’s devices and systems. This allows it to provide a comprehensive assessment of the security posture across the entire IT environment.

Rather than having to manually check each individual device, MachineTruth can review thousands of configurations simultaneously using advanced analytics and machine learning models. It understands the formats and semantics of various config file types to extract the relevant security settings.

Not only does this drastically reduce the time and effort required for such a wide-ranging assessment, but it also ensures that the review is exhaustive and consistent. No device is overlooked and the same benchmarks are applied across the board.

Comparison to Standards and Best Practices

MachineTruth doesn’t just parse the configuration files, it intelligently compares them to industry standards, vendor hardening guidelines, and established best practices for security. It checks for things like:

• Insecure default settings that should be changed
• Missing patches or outdated software versions with known vulnerabilities
• Inconsistent security controls and policies across devices
• Configurations that violate the organization’s own standards and requirements

By analyzing configurations through the lens of these guidelines, MachineTruth can identify deviations and gaps that introduce risk. It augments the automated analytics with manual reviews by experienced security engineers using custom-built tools. This combination of machine intelligence and human expertise ensures a thorough assessment.

Actionable Reports and Remediation Guidance

The findings from the assessment are compiled into clear, actionable reports for different audiences. An executive summary provides a high-level overview for leadership and less technical stakeholders. A detailed technical report gives security and IT managers the information they need to understand and prioritize the issues.

Crucially, MachineTruth also provides mitigation recommendations for each finding. It includes a spreadsheet of all identified misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, sorted by severity, with a suggested remediation step for each. This enables the IT team to immediately get to work on fixing the issues.

For even easier remediation, device-specific reports can be generated listing the problems found on each individual machine. These are immensely useful for the personnel who will be implementing the changes and closing the gaps.

By providing this clear guidance on what needs to be fixed and how, MicroSolved helps organizations quickly translate the assessment results into meaningful corrective actions to reduce their cyber risk.

Flexible Engagement Model

MicroSolved offers flexible options for engaging with the MachineTruth assessment to match different organizations’ needs and capabilities. The typical process takes 4-8 weeks from when the configuration files are provided to the generation of the final reports.

Customers can gather the necessary configuration files from their devices on their own or with assistance from MicroSolved’s team as needed. The files are securely transferred to MicroSolved for analysis via an online portal or designated server. The assessment team keeps the customer informed throughout the process of any significant issues or signs of compromise discovered.

For organizations that want an ongoing program to maintain proper configurations over time, multi-year engagements are available. This continuity enables MicroSolved to provide enhanced features like:

• Tracking reporting preferences to streamline assessments
• Showing trends over time to measure improvement
• Storing customer-defined policies and standards for reference
• Tuning findings based on accepted risks and false positives

These value-added services optimize the assessment process, accelerate remediation work, and help demonstrate the security program’s progress to both technical personnel and executive leadership.

Focus on Outcomes Over Rote Auditing

With MachineTruth, the focus is on identifying and mitigating real issues and risks, not just rotely comparing settings to a checklist. While it leverages standards and best practices, it goes beyond them to surface relevant problems given each organization’s unique environment and requirements.

The assessment process includes validation steps and quality checks, with peer reviews of findings before they are finalized. The reporting phase involves dialogue with the customer to make sure the results are accurate, understandable, and suited to their needs. Workshops and presentations help various stakeholders understand the outcomes and key mitigation steps.

By emphasizing communication, practical guidance, and alignment with the organization’s goals, MicroSolved ensures the assessment delivers meaningful results and measurable security improvements. It’s not just an audit report to stick on a shelf, but an action plan to strengthen the organization’s defenses.

Conclusion

Proper configuration of devices and applications is a fundamental part of any organization’s security program, but one that is increasingly difficult to get right given the scale and complexity of modern IT environments. MicroSolved’s MachineTruth: Global Configuration Assessment harnesses the power of machine learning and data analytics to verify configurations en masse against standards and best practices.

This innovative assessment enables organizations to efficiently identify and remediate misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and inconsistent controls across their IT infrastructure. With clear, actionable reports and a flexible engagement model, MicroSolved makes it easier to strengthen security posture and concretely mitigate risks.

As cyber threats continue to escalate, organizations need next-generation assessment capabilities like MachineTruth to meet the challenge. It marries the subject matter expertise of world-class security professionals with the speed and scalability of artificial intelligence to deliver a truly enterprise-grade solution for configuration security.

More Information

To learn more about MicroSolved’s MachineTruth: Global Configuration Assessment and how it can help improve your organization’s security posture, contact us today. Our team of experienced security professionals is ready to discuss your specific needs and provide a tailored solution. Don’t wait until it’s too late; take proactive steps to strengthen your defenses and mitigate risks. Contact MicroSolved now and empower your organization with advanced configuration security capabilities. (Email info@microsolved.com or call us at +1.614.351.1237 to speak to our expert team)

 

* AI tools were used as a research assistant for this content.