Mobilizing CTEM with XM Cyber and Jira Integration

One of the key stages to effectively implement a Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) Program is the Mobilization stage. 

This last step along the journey is to actually put into practice your program and processes, based on the findings from the earlier stages, and start to remediate the exposure issues that present the truest risk to your business.

A key objective of this stage is to make sure everyone is on the same page, they understand their role and responsibilities within the context of the program, and most importantly, they have the information they need at their fingertips to take the necessary action.

To make this stage a reality, the XM Cyber Continuous Exposure Management Platform seamlessly integrates with your existing ticketing systems, such as Jira.

By integrating Jira with XM Cyber, you can simplify the mobilization of your remediation efforts, and increase the collaboration of your IT Operations and security risk management teams, through our guided mitigation and remediation playbooks, to ensure the right team members have the right information at hand, and the justification they need in order to act.

Throughout the earlier CTEM stages, the XM Cyber platform helps you prioritize and validate the highest risk choke points that are discovered via attack path analysis, that assess all exposure types (misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, weak security posture and identity issues), across all infrastructure environments. (Public Cloud, Private Cloud, On-Prem DC’s, Branch offices and remote workers). This allows you to see all ways an adversary could move laterally across your hybrid environment, to compromise your critical assets. 

After validating all possible attack paths, and prioritizing each scenario based on the complexity and severity, teams can understand where to focus attention and which exposure risks need to be addressed first.

Our bi-directional integration between Jira with XM Cyber has been optimized to suit the needs of both product operators, and to fit seamlessly into your existing operational workflows.

The integration is specifically designed to help bridge the gap between teams and security tools, enable optimal experiences for all parties, and simplify the delivery of CTEM mobilization.

From the XM Cyber platform, you can automate the creation of remediation tasks directly into Jira. They can then be delegated to the relevant Jira Project team. The ticket creation task from XM Cyber includes all relevant fields and mandatory attributes, based on the Jira Project logic.

Mobilization Benefits for the Jira Project Teams:

Getting the right information to the right team members is essential to smooth operational workflows. To help get all teams on the same page and minimize unnecessary communication delays, the Tickets created in Jira will have all the mandatory project fields completed, along with the critical information on the actions needed to help your teams prioritize accordingly. 

Each ticket explains why the remediation request has been raised which helps justify the action needed, but in a language, your teams want and need to hear.

Unlike other solutions that simply add more tickets to the ever-increasing to-do list, the XM Cyber Continuous Exposure Management Platform provides your IT operations teams with the guidance they need to implement effective remediation and mitigation controls, delivered in easy to understand human-readable remediation guidance playbooks.

Now your teams can work smarter, and stop wasting time on fixes that don’t impact business risk.

Mobilization Benefits for the XM Cyber Platform Team:

To maximise convenience and flexibility, the automated ticket creation can be initiated from any Remediation advice across the XM Cyber portal. Focusing on the individual Remediation item ensures that when you add a new Task, it can be assigned to the relevant project team.

So identity and credential-related issues are passed to the Active Directory team, Network segmentation requests are sent to the Network Security team and of course, the Patching guidance for vulnerabilities is sent to the VRM or appropriate endpoint team.

On each occasion, the relevant remediation advice will be added to the ticket to not only inform on exactly what is needed, but also to aid with the justification of why the remediation efforts or compensating controls is relevant, and what the impact would be if no action is taken.

It’s also now possible to track all Jira tickets directly from the XM Cyber Platform.

This allows you to see a centralized view of all your Jira tasks reflected in XM and their statuses. With this, you can check that all your tasks are properly assigned and then monitor their progress, for closed-loop remediation.

Conclusion:

The XM Cyber and Jira integration is an essential step on the journey to success for the mobilization of a CTEM program. It ensures your IT operations teams have the guidance they need to implement effective remediation and mitigation controls, delivered in the language they understand, with the context of business impact to help prioritize efforts based on risk.

To find out more about how XM Cyber’s Continuous Exposure Management platform can help your organization work smarter, through remediation efficiency, check out our guide to Operationalizing the Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) Framework so we can show you how to Fix Less, but prevent More!