RiskXchange enables organisations to remain flexible while ensuring business resilience and continuity in an ever-evolving environment.
In today’s fast-paced, quickly becoming home-based, digital space, it is now fundamentally important to ensure that all companies are cyber resilient.
Cyber resilience refers to an organisation’s ability to continuously deliver the intended outcome, despite adverse cyber events. The concept essentially brings the areas of information security, business continuity, and organisational resilience together while ensuring that all bases are covered. It is an ever-evolving process that requires a continuous monitoring procedure.
Not only is cyber resilience crucial within the closed office environment of any organisation, but even more so now with remote teams working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. The sudden shift to remote work has called for secure new cloud environments and digital support for virtual third-party relationships.
New operating models
Conforming to remote operating models comes with new IT and security team challenges, such as:
- Securing a more complex attack surface that is spread across an office, cloud, and remote personal devices.
- Supporting and securing vendor onboarding without taking on extra risk.
- Securing an increasing amount of workload under budgetary constraints.
These challenges have brought cyber resilience and third-party risk management programs into focus. The following processes will help IT and security teams gain the agility needed to support their organisations as they deal with a fast-changing and evolving work environment.
1. Third-party risk management
Organisations have been accustomed to working alongside third-party vendors for decades now, something which even before the pandemic was a process they struggled to secure. Below are the top ways cyber resilient companies can best manage third-party risk at scale:
Streamline the vendor onboarding process
Organisations worldwide are utilising cybersecurity ratings to streamline their vendor onboarding process. With security data delivered by cybersecurity firms like RiskXchange, organisations gain an immediate understanding of prospective vendors’ security posture. Not only does it allow for prioritising due diligence by risk and criticality, but also demonstrates all risk factors and how to combat them.
Efficient security assessments
Vendor security assessments are now moving away from the central hub. Organisations are conducting efficient remote assessments using technology that allows them to identify high-risk vendors through cybersecurity assessments and questionnaires at scale. This new technology enables teams to identify, highlight and pinpoint any security risk without the manual labour to do so.
2. Resilience through automation
Continuous monitoring, or at least a re-assessment, of third-party vendors, is crucial to the success and security of any organisation. Here is how automation is helping organisations around the world:
Continuous cybersecurity monitoring for vendors
Continuously tracking and monitoring third-party security issues can prevent costly visibility gaps appearing within an organisation. Cybersecurity ratings and automated questionnaire solutions enhance internal and remote workflows with the ability to continuously monitor the cyber health of third-party vendors and their overall security posture.
Simplified operations
Automating tasks— such as identifying unpatched systems and open access ports – minimises human error and saves both resources and time for more high-level efforts. Organisations can also optimise their security operations by leveraging a solution that integrates with the tools they are currently using— such as SIEM and GRC – to get the most out of their technology.
3. Leveraging Existing Tools
Worsening due to the pandemic and budget constraints, fiscal challenges are not expected to go away any time soon. Let us take a closer look at how security teams can best optimise costs in the current climate:
Security reporting
IT and security leaders are creating a fast and effective reporting framework to communicate risk to executives who may not be familiar with what is, or what is not a cyber risk. By analysing objective data and key performance indicators (KPIs), internal and external security teams can demonstrate the value of cybersecurity initiatives within tight budgets.
Measured ROI on security investments
Prioritising internal and third-party security risks allow security executives to support business functionality while demonstrating cost savings. Utilising the right technology enhances existing workflows, provides organisations with comprehensive threat intelligence for security and spending and increases the value of security investments.
About RiskXchange
RiskXchange enables organisations to remain flexible while ensuring business resilience and continuity in an ever-evolving environment.
RiskXchange provides a powerful AI-assisted, yet simple automated and centralised 360-degree cybersecurity risk rating management approach. We generate objective and quantitative reporting on a company’s cybersecurity risk and performance, which enables organisations with evolving business requirements to conduct business securely in today’s open and collaborative digital world.
RiskXchange is an information security technology company, which helps companies of all sizes fight the threat of cyber threats by providing instant risk ratings for any company across the globe. RiskXchange was founded and is led by recognised experts within the security industry, who have held leading roles within companies such as IBM Security.
Find out more here.