What is compliance?

Components and Component templates

Compliance analysis and remediation are performed based on two types of TrueSight Server Automation objects: components and component templates.

Components — The parts that make up a server configuration.

Component templates — Contain relevant compliance rules that you want your servers to adhere to. Essentially, templates contain the parts, or assets on the server, that you want to evaluate for compliance.

Compliance policy

Compliance policies are the rules by which the servers or components are evaluated for compliance. Basically, these are the component templates mentioned above.

Compliance Policies for many common standards are provided out of the box by BMC as part of Compliance Content. These are pre-built regulatory policies, which are very helpful for auditors.

You can also create your own component templates to contain the compliance rules for your internal corporate compliance policies. This is a common course of action when analyzing operational compliance, which involves tracking the properties of operating system objects (such as files, configurations, user accounts, or services). A typical example for creating your own compliance policy would be for Build Compliance.

Compliance content

Pre-built component templates offered out of the box by BMC to analyze regulatory compliance or security compliance. Such templates can facilitate compliance analysis when you need to adhere to industry-defined compliance policies (such as CIS, DISA, HIPAA, PCI, or SOX).

Note: TrueSight Server Automation offers an additional type of compliance analysis based on Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) benchmark content. SCAP benchmark content is stored as sets of XML files in the depot and a special SCAP Compliance Job is available for analyzing adherence to SCAP benchmark rules. For more information, see SCAP-compliance-analysis and Creating-and-modifying-SCAP-Compliance-Jobs.

Audit Job

Audit Jobs allow you to compare server objects, components, server object based snapshots or component based snapshots to determine whether their configurations match a standard configuration. You can base audits on components or server objects.

Performing an audit based on components requires you to identify a master — that is, one or more components or component-based snapshots that act as a master.

Compliance Job

To determine whether a component satisfies its compliance rules, you run a Compliance Job. The Compliance Job looks at the component's compliance parts and compares them to the part and property conditions that the compliance rules require.

If a rule is not met and remediation is enabled, you can correct the compliance failure by deploying a BLPackage to one or more servers, assuming that a BLPackage is specified as part of the compliance rules. A Compliance Job can automatically perform this remediation if you enable automatic remediation for both the job definition and the component template. Alternatively, you can review the results of a Compliance Job and manually choose the compliance rule failures that require remediation. 

Define or acquire compliance policies

Create your own component templates to contain the compliance rules for your internal corporate policies, or use the prebuilt component templates offered by BMC Software to analyze regulatory compliance or security compliance (such as CIS, DISA, HIPAA, PCI, or SOX).

If you are using Compliance Content, you must first install and load the content.

Set up users and permissions

BMC recommends that you set up a compliance user who is in charge of performing compliance analyses, and limit the permissions so that this user cannot perform other types of actions in TrueSight Server Automation. This process is described in Walkthrough-Restricting-permissions-for-a-Compliance-officer.

Create a component template

Sometimes you have to create your own templates that contain custom compliance rules.When you create and edit your own template, you:

• Select the template parts, which are the server objects that make up the component template.
• Define a discovery signature, which contains the minimum conditions to satisfy for a component to be associated with a server (for example, only servers that contain a particular configuration file or service).
  You can test your signature against live servers while creating and perfecting it, even before you run a Discovery Job against it. For information about these procedures, see Creating-a-component-template and Editing-a-component-template.

Test the rule conditions and remediations

To quickly determine whether a component's signature conditions are valid on its associated target server, you can run a short validation process on any existing component. This validation process is especially useful in the case of components that you created manually, or if you need to re-validate a component after modifying the signature in the component template.

You should also test the remediation packages to ensure that they produce the desired result.

Run a Component Discovery Job for the component template

Next, you run a Component Discovery Job to discover components and create a group for organizing target components — The Component Discovery Job associates components with servers that satisfy the discovery signature defined within the component template. The components that are discovered by the Component Discovery Job serve as targets for Compliance Jobs. For information about creating and running Component Discovery Jobs, see Creating-and-modifying-Component-Discovery-Jobs.

In TrueSight Server Automation 8.7 and later, this task has become optional, as you can authorize any subsequent Compliance Job to perform an automatic component discovery, which will generate components just before analyzing their compliance.

(Optional) Create a component smart group for the discovered objects

You might find it useful to create a component group (either a static group or a smart group) that contains all of the discovered components that are relevant to the Compliance Job. For information about creating a smart group, see Defining-a-smart-group.
 

Create a Compliance Job or Audit Job

Your next step is to create the Compliance Job or Audit Job that examines the component's compliance parts and compares them to the part and property conditions that the compliance rules require.

You can set up the job to to correct any compliance failures automatically, by deploying a BLPackage to one or more servers, assuming that a BLPackage is specified as part of the compliance rules. To do so, you would need to enable automatic remediation for both the job definition and the component template. Or, you can review the results of the job and manually choose the compliance rule failures that require remediation. 

Run the Compliance Job

The Compliance Job determines whether or not a component satisfies its compliance rules. The Compliance Job examines the component's compliance parts and compares them to the part and property conditions defined within the component template's compliance rules.

Review the results of the job

Before you perform remediation on compliance failures, review the results of your Compliance Job for details about the components on each server that satisfied or failed to satisfy each of the defined compliance rules.

Remediate the compliance failures

Remediation of a compliance failure involves the deployment of a remediation package to the servers on which compliance rules failed.

In some situations, you can set certain components as exceptions to particular compliance rules. For example, you might want to allow the responsible user time to resolve a problem before initiating remediation through TrueSight Server Automation.

Re‐run the Compliance Job or Audit Job to verify remediation

To ensure that remediation has been completed successfully, run the Compliance Job or Audit Job again to verify that the targets are now in a compliant state.