Martinez says Miami Beach deployed Symantec Enter-prise Security Manager to handle its vulnerability scanning and monitor for policy deviations. The tool comes with templates for NIST and NSA standards, for example. Martinez relies on these security templates to map compliance with industry regulations such as PCI and internal policies for mobile connectivity. The city also uses eEye's Blink for real-time IPS and IDS monitoring.

"Symantec ESM is very good at creating our policy templates for servers and tells us whether we're in or out of compliance," Martinez says. "The tool is a good way of showing an auditor that we're doing quarterly audit compliance runs against our machines and remediating."

In the event a security issue threatens the safety of data (and compliance), Martinez says he can resolve it by examining the root cause. Using ITIL, he can determine whether changes in a server or firewall setting, for instance, led to the particular issue.

"It helps you troubleshoot and get back to square one and figure out where this problem was introduced," he says. "If you've got an SLA, how can I guarantee t...

I need to make sure I am controlling proactively the changes in the environment or making sure those changes are reviewed prior to being implemented."

Martinez says it's vital that risks associated with any change area assessed prior to implementation.

"Change has to be well thought-out," he says. "I believe it's critical to the security and availability of production environments. If you do not have adequate change control strategies in place, it's a matter of time before you have a major outage."

Forrester's Othersen says most organizations are in similar straits to these three where they're in the process of adopting frameworks and on their way toward a normalized compliance environment.

"About 10 percent have achieved that nirvana state where they're normalized, their frameworks are rationalized and automated," Othersen says. "The rest are putting down frameworks, getting budgets. There's no procurement or engineering yet, but everyone is getting there. It's just cost inefficient to run things the way they are today."

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