Techtalk:
Rolling out Essential Eight with inforcer

MSP WEBINAR · ON-DEMAND · 5 MINS

Nathan Atkins, Head of Cloud Enablement, inforcer

In this five-minute Techtalk, Nathan Atkins, Head of Cloud Enablement at inforcer, shows how MSPs can roll out the Essential Eight across tenants: run an Essential Eight maturity level one assessment, export the report for the client, align the tenant to a master Essential Eight baseline policy by policy, then re-run the assessment to show 100% compliance.

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IN THIS WEBINAR

Essential Eight

Compliance

Baselines

inforcer webinar thumbnail

Key takeaways

1

Assess first, then show the client. Running the Essential Eight maturity level one assessment gives a score, passed and failed checks, the reason for each check and the related ISM controls, in a report you can export to get the go-ahead.

2

Align to a master baseline. The align view splits policies into recommended from baseline, unaccepted deviations, aligned, existing customer policies and accepted deviations. Rename a matching customer policy to the baseline name, then align its properties to the known good state.

3

Prove it and repeat it. Re-run the assessment after aligning to show the improvement, export the report, and apply the same baseline to every customer so they all sit in the same state.

4

Eight strategies, many controls. The Essential Eight covers application patching, operating system patching, restricting admin privileges, multi-factor authentication, application control and more, each with its own controls, which is what makes it hard to meet across many tenants.

5

Start with recommended from baseline. In the align view, deploy the policies the baseline recommends, such as MFA for all users, then work through the unaccepted deviations and existing customer policies.

Standardize compliance across every tenant

See how inforcer shares baselines across tenants

Transcript

Part 1 of 3, 5 minutes, with Nathan Atkins. Lightly edited for readability.

The Essential Eight challenge

Essential 8 compliance across multiple tenants is difficult. Hi, my name is Nathan and I'm from inforcer. Let me show you how easy compliance with the Essential 8 can be. As you may know, the Essential 8 has eight categories or mitigation strategies and then there's a number of controls that fall under that. Application patching, operating system patching, restriction of admin privilege, multiffactor authentication. You've got application control, office macro restrictions, user application hardening, and regular backups. So, they form the eight categories that all of the policies that you then instigate fall under.

So, as an MSP, a multi-tenented approach to this, you've got all of these different categories that you've got to meet. How do you then standardize and enable your customers to have Essential 8 rolled out easily and effectively across all of your tenants that you manage?

Assessing the tenant

So, here we have inforcer and what we're going to do for our customer first is assess where they sit in regards to compliance with the Essential 8. So I'm going to come over to our assessment, select my Essential 8 maturity level one check, and I'm going to select my tenant. So I've got here the Nakatomi Corporation. I run my assessment against them, and we can see that they've got an overall score of 59%. They've passed of 29, failed of 20.

So not a terrible score, but we can see that they need to do some work. We can export this report. We show the customer what it is. It gives them an idea of what the check is, the reason behind the check, why it failed, and also the ISM controls that are then related to that. So, let's assume now that we've got authorization to do the work, we've submitted that report, we've got the okay, we got the go-ahad.

Aligning to the baseline

Now, how do we actually fix this? So, using inforcer, this is actually quite a simple process. I now come over here to align and I select based on my master E8 baseline I'm going to select my Nakatomi corporation and what we can see here is that it is broken down into three sections you can see that you have an unaccepted deviation you've got a recommended from baseline and you've got the aligned policy set two other areas that exist are the existing customer policies and the accepted deviation so I've already done a little bit of tweaking to this client in advance.

But what we want to focus on first is the recommended from baseline. So here this is where we can come in. We see a policy here. We go oh this is missing. We can see that this is going to be MFA for all users. We can see that this function here is required. So this is MFA for all admins. This is MFA for all users. This gives us a fairly good indication that this needs to be aligned.

What we can do is expand this and we can see the display name, the controls and we can see what differs. So now all we need to do rename to baseline and this changes the customer's policy to match our baseline policy. We hit rename and that is now processed. So now we can see that this policy is now in our unaccepted deviation. So we can see here that there are some properties that are different. We want these to match the baseline because this is our known good state.

We align. We hit next. We select our options. So, we want our MFA policy to be enabled. We're happy with the rest of the defaults. We hit submit. We click close. That deployment is now in progress. And we can see it's now disappeared. It will now be showing under the align section. So, we can see it here as now aligned. So now we just need to deal with the other issues that we can see here in our organization.

So let's get fixing. And now we have 100% alignment for this customer. So now we can actually go back and rerun that assessment and see where we score now. So here we are. We're back here in our assessment. We can rerun it.

Re-running the assessment

We've got our essential maturity level one check selected. We've got our customer Nakatomi Corporation there ready to go. Let's run our assessment and see where we sit. Hey, fireworks. There we go. We've got 100% compliance. We can now export that report, show that to our customer, and that's how quick and easy it can be to achieve Essential 8 compliance. And we can standardize this across multiple customers and have them all sitting in the same way. So, thanks very much for watching.