Running Security Compliance audits with the Audit and Compliance tool

Learn how to quickly run security compliance audits across all of your Cisco Meraki networks.

Written by Boundless

Updated 3 years ago

Overview

Boundless Audit and Compliance (A&C) is an advanced compliance toolkit that lets you quickly audit your networks against predefined compliance rules.

You can define constraints on settings such as Configuration settings, Security rules and content filters, Naming conventions around networks and devices, and also ensure any Tag compliance to keep your tagging organized.

Follow this article to learn about how the Boundless Audit and Compliance Security tool works.

Prerequisites

Initial setup
Before using the Boundless Audit and Compliance tool, you must have previously setup your Boundless account and synchronized the Boundless Platform with your Meraki organization.

Using the Audit and Compliance Security Tool

Step 1 | Select your Compliance rule set

On the Network Management Dashboard, tap on the Audit and Compliance section.

Then select what kind of rule set you want to create - in this case it will be a Security rule, but you can choose amongst naming conventions, tags or wider configuration rule sets.

This will open an initial page, where you can find a summary of your previously deployed security rule set, and also create new ones.

Note that if you are using the application for the first time, the summary will look empty.

Finally, click on the New Rule Set button (on the right side of your screen).

Step 2 | Create a Security rule set

Once you've gone through the first step, you'll get redirected to the Configuration Rule Set template. Here, you'll just need to fill in the fields as per your requirements.

Rule set name
First of all, enter a name for your rule set.

We recommend you to be as specific as possible on your naming conventions, or to use nomenclatures to easily track the deployed rule sets and quickly understand what each of them contains. This will save you some time in the long run.

Targets
Select the network you'd like to audit. You can either select all networks, or type the name of the networks you'd like to audit.

Define you configuration rule set
The Audit and Compliance Security template includes all network security parameters available through the Meraki API.

You can choose to define:
- Content filtering parameters
- Security appliance services
- Layer 3 outbound rules
- Cellular failover rules
- Layer 7 firewall rules
- Port forwarding rules
- 1:1 NAT rules
- 1:Many NAT rules
- SSID layer 3 outbound rules

You can combine as many security settings as you would require.

Note that the Security parameters can also be found on the wider Audit and Compliance Configuration tool.
If you want to include configuration parameters other than the Security ones within your rule set, we recommend you to directly create a Configuration rule set instead of a Security one.

Save your Rule Set
Once you have your Security template ready, click on Save Changes and go back to the initial page.

Step 3 | Run a Compliance audit

Once the Security rule set is created the system will automatically audit your organization and alert you if any network isn't compliant with the new rule set.

The rule sets are a dynamic asset. This means that after deployed, they will continue to audit your Meraki organization and launch an alert when non-compliant changes take place.

When that happens, you can use the Boundless FlexTemplates for rapidly applying the necessary configuration changes to one or more networks.

You can also dismiss selected network alerts by clicking on the trash icon (on the right of the screen) or the dismiss button (included in each individual alert report).

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