How to achieve your business objectives with external data integration

After you have identified the business objectives for external data integration, you need to perform certain tasks to meet those objectives.
To elaborate on the required actions, let us take the example of the use-case scenarios to elaborate on the implementation of the external data integration.
External data integration model based on your business objective
Scenario
Description
What you need to do
Import external data and view the data in CCS Dashboards without correlating to the CCS assets
You can import the external data and view the data by using CCS Dashboards. For the basic Dashboard and panel creation using imported data, you do not need to correlate the external data to the CCS assets.
To meet this business goal, you need to do the following:
  • Identify the asset and the status fields for the external data and map the data field to the existing CCS data schema or custom data schema.
  • Identify the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you want to use to monitor the data and subsequently to create the panels.
Import external data and view the data in CCS Dashboards in correlation with the CCS assets.
You can import the external data and view the data by using the CCS Dashboards in correlation with the CCS assets. By means of correlation, you basically establish an association between the external assets and the existing CCS assets.
To meet this business goal, you need to do the following:
  • Identify the key fields for the following attributes in the external data:
    • Asset
    • Status
  • Once you have identified the mentioned fields, you must map the fields to the existing CCS data schema or a custom data schema.
  • Identify and map the fields that you want to use to correlate the data to the assets.
  • Identify the asset-based KPIs that you want to use to monitor the data and subsequently to create the panels.
Import external data and use it for policy compliance
You can import the external data and use the data for policy compliance calculation in correlation with the CCS assets. By means of correlation, you basically establish an association between the external assets and the existing CCS assets.
To meet this business goal, you need to do the following:
  • Identify the key fields for the following attributes in the external data:
    • Asset
    • Assessment
    • Status
  • Map the identified data fields in the external data to the existing CCS data schema or a custom data schema.
  • Identify the possible result values in the external data and map the values to the CCS result attributes.
  • Based on the mandates that you want to comply to, decide if the existing assessments are sufficient or you need to create new assessment procedures.
  • Based on the mandates that you want to comply to, decide if the existing control statements are sufficient or you need to create new ones.
Import external data and use it for contributing to the CCS asset risk score
You can import the external data and use the data for risk score calculation in correlation with the CCS assets. You can use the imported data to correlate with the CCS assets and then calculate the risk score of the assets based on CVSS attributes and the risk score that is defined in the external data.
To meet this business goal, you need to do the following:
  • Identify the key fields for the following attributes in the external data:
    • Asset
    • Assessment
    • Status
  • Once you have identified the mentioned fields, you must map the fields to the existing CCS data schema or a custom data schema.
  • Identify and map the fields in the external data that you want to correlate to the assets.
  • Identify and map the result fields in the external data that you want to correlate to the CCS result attributes.
  • Decide if you want to use CVSS attributes to calculate the risk score or you want to use the existing risk score of the external data.
  • Specify a value for the weight to be used in the risk score calculation.
  • Decide if you want to use the risk score in the external data to calculate the asset risk aggregation in CCS.