NIA Executive Summary Report

The National Information Assurance (NIA) Policy v2.0 is associated with the State of Qatar’s Ministry of Transport and Communications (MOTC). This policy was developed to help agencies and entities in the State of Qatar enable a full-fledged information security management system within their agency. According to the fourth policy objective, organizations are required to demonstrate compliance with the NIA Policy v2.0 through an annual audit by a certification body. 

This policy includes a series of security governances and technical controls. These technical controls are grouped into security domains that cover control areas that an agency is required to implement as baseline security for compliance with the NIA Policy v2.0, and in accordance with the National Information Assurance Manual. This report will enable the executive team to gauge the compliance of the NIA Policy within their organization. The CISO will use this report to directly brief the executive team on the state of vulnerability and the organizations NIA policy v2.0 compliance.

The NIA Manual is designed to be used in conjunction with the National Information Classification Policy and applicable laws and regulations within the State of Qatar. The manual provides, baseline controls which an organization should implement at minimum to protect their information system. The security controls are grouped into the following domains:

• Access Control Security [AM]
• Cryptographic Security [CY]
• Gateway Security [GS]
• Information Exchange [IE]
• Logging, Auditing & Security Monitoring [SM]
• Network Security [NS]
• Product Security [PR]
• Software Security [SS]
• System Usage Security [SU]
• Virtualization [VL]. 

Agencies conforming to the NIA manual may implement over and above the baseline. In many cases NIA controls intersect with other regulations, such as Center for Internet Security (CIS) or the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.  The organization must consider compliance to NIA or other standards, but must implement the higher degree of security.

Tenable.sc provides agencies the ability to show compliance status with the NIA policy v2.0. The report starts with an executive summary which establishes the CISO with an understanding of NIA policy v2.0 compliance and the status of vulnerability using Tenable.sc. The report also uses trending data to assist the CISO in understanding the historic NIA compliance. Comparative matrices provide counts and percentages of vulnerabilities and detected devices that have been mitigated along with the risks that remain outstanding.

Using this report a CISO is able to get a quick view at compliance and track how patching efforts are going. Using audit files provided by Tenable.sc, and the cross-reference field, a CISO and risk manager are able to see related compliance checks and even connect them to other global security standards. 

The report is available in the Tenable.sc Feed, a comprehensive collection of dashboards, reports, assurance report cards and assets. The report can be easily located in the Tenable.sc Feed under the category Compliance & Configuration Assessment.

The report requirements are:

• Tenable.sc 5.14.1
• Nessus 8.10.1
• Compliance data

Tenable.sc Continuous View (CV) is the market-defining On-Prem Cyber Exposure Platform. Tenable.sc CV provide the ability to continuously Assess an organization’s adherence to best practice configuration baselines. Tenable.sc provides customers with a full and complete Cyber Exposure platform for completing an effective Information Security Management System program prescribed by the NIA standard.

This report contains:

Executive Summary: The Executive Summary chapter provides the team a quick view into NIA Compliance and VPR summary matrices. The NIA Compliance Checks Overview matrix presents the results of compliance audits to verify secure system configurations.

NIA Compliance Summary: The NIA Policy v2.0 Compliance Summary chapter enables a CISO or risk manager to establish an understanding on NIA compliance and track mitigation efforts. By displaying a trend analysis for all NIA compliance checks risk managers are able to track the proficiency of the operations team.

Vulnerability Summary: The Vulnerability Summary chapter allows the CISO to understand how patching efforts are going and a quick glance look at the organization’s state of vulnerability. The VPR Mitigated Summary matrix provides organizations with a view of vulnerabilities that have been mitigated, showing progress towards risk management SLA’s.