Why you should assess you cyber security posture?
To figure out whether you need a security posture assessment, let’s first look at some facts. As enterprises move to the cloud, tens and thousands of assets are being migrated to cloud storage servers. In fact, according to a recent study, 61% of companies made the switch to the cloud in 2021 alone.
While cloud technology improves collaboration and streamlines data accessibility, having critical digital assets stored online has also increased exploitation opportunities for cybercriminals, prompting cybersecurity concerns.
Chances of cybersecurity breaches get even higher when accounting for third-party vendors who have access to your network, as this expands the attack surface and gives cybercriminals more of an opportunity to access your data.
These security concerns are justified in the number of cyberattacks on organisations—out of a survey of 200 CISOs, over 90% reported experiencing cloud security breaches.
Another study showed that more than 51% of companies suffered a data breach because of vulnerabilities in vendor networks, indicating that organisations can still be vulnerable despite taking precautions to secure their networks.
To mitigate these risks, you need better insight into your attack surface and a more efficient method for evaluating cyber risks that can ensure you are informed when you or vendors are at risk.
Here, conducting a cyber security posture assessment can help achieve these twin goals.
How can a cyber security posture assessment benefit your organisation?
These kinds of assessments can tell a lot about your organisation’s cyber risk, as they reveal your ability to withstand or react to a cyberattack by providing detailed insight into controls and processes that determine a response to a cyber breach.
These insights can prove critical to your cybersecurity strategy as they can help you stay updated on your cybersecurity status and strengthen your cyber security posture to thwart any potential attacks.
A cybersecurity assessment can also keep you up-to-date on the type of internet assets you have and who is accessing them—regardless of whether your digital assets are stored on the cloud, unmanaged, or catalogued based on geographic location—which is critical for improving security and preventing security breaches.
Alongside helping you understand cyber risks, a cybersecurity assessment will also help you understand how risk controls operate within your cybersecurity infrastructure.
For instance, you might have deployed a variety of cybersecurity mechanisms, ranging from firewalls and endpoint detection systems—deployed to prevent attacks—and security information and event management (SIEMS)—which help detect attacks that get past controls.
Evaluating your security posture will give you insight into the efficiency of these systems and reveal security gaps and identify areas for improvement.
How to conduct a cyber security posture assessment?
Assessing your security posture requires several steps, but we have broken it down into three core procedures:
It all begins with identifying your cybersecurity needs and objectives. This will help you establish a target for your security protocols to aim for and put the right systems in place to meet your specific requirements.
Once you’ve identified your goals, take an accurate inventory of your digital assets by categorising assets, including user accounts, roles, and services. This will help identify risk factors for each asset type and prioritise them based on their overall impact on your cybersecurity infrastructure.
Finally, create action plans to protect the most valuable and vulnerable assets and allocate cybersecurity resources to implement access controls and zero-trust procedures around these assets, helping you ensure that they stay secure—even if there is a security breach.
After implementing these cybersecurity measures, continuously monitor your attack surface to identify any imminent threats and weaknesses as your digital assets expand and evolve.
However, you may find it difficult to monitor the attack surface with dated tools. In such cases, you need a more advanced cyber risk management platform like RiskXchange.
Creating a secure infrastructure and mitigating cyber risk
With the number of cyberattacks rising every day, it’s imperative to devise methods to measure cyber risks more efficiently so you can prevent or withstand these attacks.
Creating a secure infrastructure and reducing cyber risk will be integral because it can save you from attacks that cost millions of dollars, protects sensitive data, and meets regulatory demands.
When formulating strategies to strengthen your cybersecurity infrastructure, a security posture assessment can help you determine how secure your infrastructure is, identify weaknesses within your cybersecurity strategies, and reveal how well your risk controls can help you mitigate cyberattacks.
Given the inverse relationship between security posture and cyber risk, these assessments can give you all the data you need to improve your security posture, reducing your cyber risks.
That’s why, at RiskXchange, we help organisations optimise their security posture with our attack surface management platform that allows you to assess your attack surface and gain the necessary insight to make informed decisions on your cyber security posture.