What is FISMA and Why Should You Care?

If you’ve ever worked with U.S. federal agencies, you’ve probably heard of FISMA—the Federal Information Security Management Act. It’s not just another acronym; it’s a law that mandates strict security controls for systems handling government data. One of its key requirements? Audit logging—the ability to track who did what, when, and how, across your system.

Why does this matter? Because without proper audit logs, you can’t prove compliance, investigate incidents, or even understand what happened when something goes wrong. And if you’re serving software to federal customers, missing FISMA compliance can be a gating issue. Even beyond government, many organizations adopt FISMA-like practices as a best practice for security and accountability.

The Value of Audit Logging

Think of audit logs as the black box of your application.
They provide:
- Accountability: Who accessed sensitive data? Who changed a configuration?
- Traceability: What sequence of actions led to an issue?
- Compliance: Meet regulatory requirements like FISMA, NIST 800-53, and STIG.
- Security Insight: Feed logs into a SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) system for aggregation, cross component correlation and real-time threat detection and alerting.

Without audit logs, you’re flying blind. With them, you have a forensic trail that can save your organization during audits or security investigations.

FISMA Logging in Cloud Pak for Business Automation (CP4BA)

The good news is that CP4BA, starting from version 25.0.0, supports FISMA-ready audit logging. We’ve introduced an Audit Logging service that captures user activities and system events in a standardized Cloud Auditing Data Federation (CADF) format. Why CADF? Because it’s widely supported by SIEM tools like Splunk and QRadar, and it aligns with other IBM Cloud Paks.

Architecture Overview

The Zen Audit Service acts as the backbone for audit logging. It collects events via REST API or CADF record files, validates them, and forwards them using Fluentd plugins to SIEM targets like Splunk, QRadar, or Kafka.

SIEM Integration

Audit data becomes truly powerful when aggregated and analyzed in a SIEM system. CP4BA forwards CADF-formatted events to Splunk, QRadar, or Kafka for centralized security monitoring and incident response.

Header Propagation

To maintain correlation across services, audit headers (AUDIT-*) are propagated through the stack, ensuring traceability from the initial client request to backend services.

How It’s Designed

Beyond logging, a consistent and extensible architecture supports such audit-logging capability:
- Zen Audit Service: the backbone for collecting, validating, and forwarding CADF-compliant records.
- Event Emission Options: REST API or rsyslog Sidecar/Integrated Mode.
- Configuration via Custom Resource (CR): Global switch and component-level fine-tuning.
- Header Propagation: Ensures correlation across services by passing AUDIT-* headers through the stack.

What Gets Logged?

Not everything—just the important stuff:
- Authentication and authorization attempts
- Changes to system configuration
- CRUD operations on significant entities
- Privilege changes
- System start/shutdown events
- Application failures

Minimum requirement? All incoming and outgoing API requests and responses.

How to Enable It

By default, audit logging is off (to keep your cluster lean). To turn it on:

1. Update the CP4BA Custom Resource:
   sc_audit_logging:
     enabled: true
2. Configure SIEM Integration using zen-audit-config ConfigMap.
3. Restart Zen Audit Pods to apply changes.

Events flow: from REST API or CADF records into Zen Audit Service, then forwarded via Fluentd plugins to SIEM targets.

Wrapping Up

FISMA audit logging in CP4BA isn’t just about ticking a compliance checkbox—it’s about building trust, security, and operational insight into clients’ automation platform. Whether working with federal agencies or just want enterprise-grade security, enabling audit logging is a smart move.

CP4BA sends CADF-formatted events to SIEM systems like Splunk, QRadar, or Kafka.