With the average cost of a data breach exceeding $3.5 million as per Cost of a Data Breach Report, almost all organizations these days adopt stringent policies in order to safeguard their confidential business and customer information. Strong RBAC-driven systems have certainly made it difficult for attackers to gain unauthorized access. However, malicious programs masked as genuine ones can compromise your environment, sneak their way into your databases, and can even allow unauthorized parties to access and/or view information.

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Today at RSA Conference, Qualys announced its new Continuous Monitoring service, empowering customers to continuously monitor mission-critical assets throughout their perimeter and immediately get alerted to anomalies that could expose them to cyber attacks. The service gives organizations the ability to proactively identify threats and unexpected changes in Internet-facing devices within their DMZ, cloud-based environments, and web applications before they are breached by attackers, bringing a new paradigm to vulnerability management.

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At Infosecurity Europe today, Qualys announced it analyzed QualysGuard Policy Compliance (PC) data from more than five million scans performed by organizations worldwide to help enterprises understand key trends as they plan their compliance strategies.

Key trends include:

• A large number of devices scanned – more than half of the scan target – are out of support, showing that companies are depending on a large number of computer technologies, especially operating systems that are no longer supported by their manufacturers through standard support.
• Newer computer technologies have a higher rate of passing compliance, confirming the general trend of higher security for newer technologies also on the compliance side.
• Companies with more frequent compliance scans have a higher rate of passing scans. This trend confirms recent findings in the area of Continuous Monitoring, where organizations that monitor more frequently also show accelerated improvements.
• Passwords are high on controls lists. Thirteen out of the top 20 controls are password-related. At the same time, top failing controls are password related

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