Stay safe with top tips for achieving NIS2 compliance

As cybersecurity threats continue to evolve, the European Union’s NIS2 Directive is pushing key, critical entities to adopt stricter cybersecurity measures. For companies in critical sectors such as finance, healthcare, energy and digital infrastructure, NIS2 is more than just a regulatory challenge – it is an opportunity to strengthen operational resilience and proactively manage cyber risks.

So how do companies deal with these new regulatory requirements? To achieve full NIS2 compliance, organizations must focus on vulnerability management, IT visibility, and incident prevention. Let’s start by understanding what NIS2 means for your business and how you can prevent incidents in the first place.

What is the NIS2 policy?

The NIS2 Directive (EU 2022/2555) aims to increase the level of cybersecurity across the European Union by improving the resilience of critical services. The directive applies to a wide range of sectors considered essential to the economy and society, from transport to financial services.

Key NIS2 commitments include:

• Risk management: Organizations must take proactive measures to identify and mitigate cybersecurity risks.
• Incident Reporting: In the event of a serious incident, affected organizations must notify authorities within 24 hours. Further updates are required within 72 hours.

The challenge for most organizations is ensuring they can meet these requirements by preventing incidents before they occur.

Keep pace with evolving cyber threats

Let’s take a look at the key challenges companies face under NIS2:

• Increasing complexity of cyber threats: From ransomware attacks to zero-day vulnerabilities, the number and complexity of cyber threats are increasing. Organizations need solutions to detect, prioritize and remediate these vulnerabilities in real time.
• Fragmented IT environments: With multi-cloud infrastructures and legacy systems, many companies find it difficult to gain visibility into their entire IT landscape. This makes it difficult to detect software vulnerabilities and ensure NIS2 compliance.
• Proactive risk management: NIS2 places great emphasis on risk prevention. The focus is not just on responding to incidents, but on preventing them. This requires a proactive approach to vulnerability and patch management.

How Flexera helps you proactively manage cyber risks

Flexera’s Software Vulnerability Management (SVM) solution is designed to address these challenges head-on. By focusing on incident prevention rather than just post-incident reporting, Flexera helps you avoid triggering NIS2’s 24-72 hour incident reporting window. Here’s how:

• Real-time vulnerability detection: SVM provides continuous scanning of your IT environment and identifies vulnerabilities in both on-premises and cloud applications. This allows you to identify risks as they arise, ensuring you can act quickly to mitigate potential threats.
• Automated patch management: One of the biggest challenges in managing cybersecurity risks is deploying patches in a timely manner. Flexera automates this process, ensuring critical vulnerabilities are addressed promptly, reducing the risk of business interruptions or security breaches.
• Prioritization by risk: Not all vulnerabilities are the same. SVM uses risk-based prioritization to focus your resources on the most critical vulnerabilities first, helping you address the issues that pose the greatest threat to your business. By remediating vulnerabilities early, Flexera helps you prevent incidents that could result in serious business interruption or financial loss – key factors for NIS2 compliance.

Wider impact: IT visibility and operational resilience

While SVM is critical for vulnerability management, NIS2 compliance goes beyond simply patching software vulnerabilities. Companies need complete visibility into their IT infrastructure to ensure they meet the risk management requirements of the directive. This is where Flexera One and IT Visibility come into play.

Flexera One provides organizations with comprehensive IT asset management with a unified view of all their IT assets – whether in the cloud or on-premises. By providing deep insights into resource usage, security vulnerabilities and compliance risks, Flexera One helps you manage your entire IT landscape more efficiently and ensure no critical area is left open.

Flexera One IT Visibility ensures that companies have a clear view of their entire infrastructure. By identifying critical dependencies and vulnerable areas, IT Visibility helps keep your security and compliance efforts focused on what matters most. This is essential to meeting the broader risk management obligations of NIS2.

Develop a proactive approach to NIS2

NIS2 places a strong emphasis on preventing incidents through proactive cybersecurity measures. With Flexera’s suite of solutions – including Software Vulnerability Management, Flexera One and IT Visibility – companies can:

• Identify and remediate vulnerabilities before they become major incidents.
• Automate patching to ensure timely remediation and shorten the window of exposure.
• Gain complete visibility into your IT landscape and ensure it meets NIS2 risk management and operational resiliency requirements.

Stay tuned to learn more about how organizations can manage incident reporting, ensure operational resilience, and align with long-term NIS2 compliance goals.

Want to learn how Flexera can help your organization meet NIS2 requirements? Contact us today for a demo.

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