Red Hat Insights Compliance: Introducing new customization options for policies

Maintaining compliance to cybersecurity standards can be a daunting task, but you can mitigate that by using Red Hat Insights. With the latest feature update, the Red Hat Insights Compliance reporting service now allows you to edit the rules in your policies to meet your organization’s requirements, giving you visibility and control over your servers.

Red Hat Insights is a managed service, included with every Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) subscription, that continuously analyzes platforms and applications to help you manage your hybrid cloud environment. Red Hat Insights uses predictive analytics and deep domain expertise to reduce the time required to perform complex operational tasks from hours to minutes. This includes identifying security and performance risks, tracking licenses and managing costs.

Compliance policies

The ability to customize regulatory compliance policies offer several benefits. For one, it allows you to track compliance according to your organization’s needs. By tailoring policies to specific requirements of your industry and organization, you can meet all necessary regulations. This minimizes the risk of non-compliance and the potential penalties that come with it.

Customizable policies also help you save time and resources. Preset policies can often be generic, requiring you to wade through irrelevant information. By customizing policies, you can focus on the specific areas that are relevant to your organization. This streamlines the compliance process, freeing up resources that could be used elsewhere.

Compliance at scale

Another significant benefit of customizable policies is the ability to monitor compliance at scale. Compliance’s new feature in Insights allows you to track policy implementation across large environments, so you can quickly identify areas of non-compliance. This helps prevent issues from escalating, and enables prompt, corrective action.

Culture of compliance

Finally, customizable policies can also help organizations build a culture of compliance. By tailoring policies to your organization’s specific needs, you create a compliance framework relevant and meaningful to employees. This fosters a culture of compliance, where employees understand the importance of following policies and procedures.

Overall, Compliance’s customizable policies are a significant benefit for organizations looking to maintain compliance. By tailoring policies to your organization’s specific needs, you save time and resources while monitoring and maintaining compliance. This new feature is just one example of how Insights continues to innovate and help organizations navigate the complex world of compliance management.

Editing rules

New features in Insights allow you to easily change the value associated with a rule that belongs to a new or existing policy.

Figure 1 and Figure 2 show the value editing feature on a new and existing policy. In both figures, the rule Set Lockout Time for Failed Password Attempts is expanded, and you can see the value associated with this rule is fail_unlock_time by looking under the header Depends on values. When the value is changed, the system within this policy is measured based on this update against it. To edit the value, you can edit the field under the Depends on values header by typing in a new value and then clicking the check mark to the right of the field.

Figure 1. Value editing for a rule within an existing policy

Figure 2. Value editing for a rule within a new policy

Rules are also now shown in nested or logical groups during the policy creation wizard, or the reports pages of the Compliance service. The nested structure provides important context about each rule. This new nested or group format for rules can be seen on existing policies, new policies and on the report page.

Figure 3. An example of nested/grouping of rules for an existing policy

Figure 4. An example of nested/grouping of rules for a new policy

Figure 5: An example of nested/grouping of rules for a report

You also have the option to switch from the nested tree view to the classic list view, where rules are displayed in a flat list instead of nested under groups:

Figure 6: Example of rule set displayed in the classic list view instead of the nested tree view

When you use a filter, the rule set automatically switches to the classic list view.

You can switch between the nested tree view and classic list view by using the buttons under View policy rules. These buttons appear on the pages and modal windows for editing a policy, creating a new policy and viewing the rule results on the reporting page. Note that when a rule is expanded and the rule details are displayed, the rule remains expanded even when you decide to switch between the different views.

Summary

In this blog we’ve demonstrated an additional method you can customize your SCAP policies within Insights Compliance, and reviewed the benefits this capability provides to you and your organization. You can learn more about Red Hat Insights in these helpful articles:

• Managing the security of your Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment with Red hat Insights
• Getting started with Red Hat Insights and OpenSCAP for compliance reporting
• Regulatory compliance at scale with Red Hat Insights
• Save time and money with Red Hat Insights Compliance reporting

Not using Insights Compliance yet? Learn more and try it today.

Mohit Goyal is a Senior Principal Product Manager for Red Hat Insights. Mohit brings a wealth of experience and skills in enterprise software having held roles as a software engineer, project manager, and as a product manager across software and travel industries. Goyal has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the Institute of Technology, University of Minnesota and a MBA from the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. With his technical skills and business acumen, he helps build products to address problems faced by enterprises, with a focus on security, user experience, and cloud computing. When he’s not writing user requirements, engaging with customers, or building product roadmaps, Mohit can be found running, cooking, or reading.

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Marley Stipich is a Software Engineer on the Insights Compliance team at Red Hat. Marley graduated from The Ohio State University in May 2020 with a degree in Computer Science and Engineering and has been working as a Software Engineer for over two years. She has a passion for solving complex problems and expressing her creativity through software development. Over the past two years, Stipich has expanded her technical experience in web development with skills in Ruby on Rails, Angular, React, JavaScript and HTML. She has also developed valuable communication and organizational skills and a keen attention to detail. In her free time, Marley enjoys exercising, reading, playing with her dog and spending time with her partner.

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