The National Weather Service Southern Region Saves up to 60 Hours per Year on Compliance Audits

30 employees

Of distributed IT team

24/7

Required system uptime

60 hours

Saved on audit preparations

Regardless of how complex the auditors’ or security team’s requests are, with Netwrix Auditor, we can just run a report and make it very simple. Netwrix Auditor saves us about 40-60 hours on preparation for each audit and even more in our daily work. But most importantly, we know that our environment is secure.

Jeff Williams, Systems Integration Branch Chief, National Weather Service Southern Region

Challenge

Ensure 24/7 uptime of a distributed IT environment that includes two Active Directory systems (local domains and an enterprise domain) and supported by a distributed IT team of 24 local domain admins and 6 enterprise-level admins.
Establish centralized IT security control and monitoring across most critical systems, including Active Directory and file servers.
Prove compliance with a set of internal and external (NIST 800-series) security regulations.

It is not an easy task to keep up with all the changes in an IT environment as distributed as ours. Yet Netwrix Auditor does the job in a very simple and efficient way.

Jeff Williams, Systems Integration Branch Chief,
National Weather Service Southern Region

Netwrix Solution

Jeff chose Netwrix Auditor because it monitors all the required systems and has extensive functionality for validation of all their security controls.

Increased system uptime. Any change, such as the incorrect configuration or deletion of an OU, can affect system performance and business continuity. Thanks Netwrix Auditor, the team has reduced the number of IT incidents and troubleshoot the remaining issues faster.
Centralized control over the entire IT environment. Netwrix Auditor’s alerts on critical changes enable the team to revert any unwanted modification in a few minutes, before any damage is done. Jeff reviews activity summaries daily to make sure that security policies are followed correctly and that nobody outside the domain admins group gets elevated privileges.
Continuous compliance and efficient audits. Netwrix Auditor's automated reports make it easy to validate internal security controls and ensure continuous compliance with NIST. In addition, the solution includes an Interactive Search that enables the IT team to quickly find any requested information. Overall, the software save the team a week or more of work preparing for the full annual audit.

Key Benefits

Centralized control over the IT environment
Business continuity
Optimized compliance with NIST and internal security requirements

Netwrix Applications

Customer Profile

The National Weather Service (NWS) provides a national infrastructure to gather and process weather-related data. With headquarters in Maryland and regional headquarters in Missouri, New York, Texas, Utah, Alaska and Hawaii, the agency has 5,000 employees in 122 weather forecast offices, 13 river forecast centers, 9 national centers and other support offices around the country. Each year, the NWS collects 76 billion observations and issues approximately 1.5 million forecasts and 50,000 warnings for the protection of life and property and enhancement of the national economy.

Customer: The National Weather Service Southern Region

Industry: Government

Website: www.weather.gov/SRH