Are We Secure? Today’s Most Important Cyber Questions
Jordan Schroeder
Managing CISO
Are we secure?
Most CISOs dread this important question, not always because their company is insecure but because it is difficult to answer comprehensively.
Think about a global enterprise. The organisation could have thousands of employees, its estate could span multiple geographic regions, and its technology assets could run into the millions. The organisation may train staff, meet regulatory compliance requirements, boast state-of-the-art security tools to defend its architecture and follow all the recommended cybersecurity hygiene best practices.
But does this make it secure? Unfortunately, the answer is still inconclusive. There are too many unknowns to reach a concrete conclusion.
But 'Are we secure?' is a question that cannot be ignored.
In today's hostile digital world, being secure is a necessity. Ransomware attacks can destroy organisations in minutes, while data breaches can cause irreparable financial damage.
Organisations must know they are secure to survive in today's digital world. Understanding an organisation's security posture is also important for stakeholders such as boards, insurers, partners, and customers.
So, how can CISOs, CTOs, CEOs, and other business leaders reach an answer?
Getting under the hood of security
The biggest problem for most organisations centres around a false sense of security. These businesses allocate budgets for cyber defences, train staff and surpass compliance requirements, so they don't understand what went wrong when they suffer a successful attack.
However, adopting security measures is only one part of the solution. The measures must also be regularly assessed to ensure their effectiveness.
Many organisations believe this assessment can be achieved via penetration testing or red teaming. While these are useful tools, they fall short of the insight organisations need into the inner workings of their security measures to answer the all-important question of 'Are we secure?'.
Compliance audits tend to look at the intent of a security measure and penetration testing performs operational tests on technical implementations. This means both these types of tests frequently miss things which can jeopardise the security of an organisation.
So, what assessments should organisations undertake to assess their security, so they can effectively report on their posture?
Cyber Risk Technical Assessments
One of the best ways to achieve an overall picture of an organisation’s cyber status is through Cyber Risk Technical Assessments.
These technical risk assessments carry out an evaluation of an organisation's cybersecurity posture, its integrations, network design and configurations, against key cybersecurity best practices and frameworks to understand how secure they are, not just by design, but in practice. The assessments also test organisations against different threat scenarios, including data loss, network takeover and ransomware, to take a risk-informed look at the IT environment against realistic threats.
Unlike penetration tests or compliance audits, Cyber Risk Technical Assessments get under the hood of an organisation. Assessors will interview senior management to understand the "crown jewels" of the business. They will then use this information to run a full company assessment to identify issues that could put it at risk.
The assessments cover on-premises and cloud assets to assess that the environment is set up and configured correctly, and what the exposure is to other types of threat vectors that could cause harm.
Once weaknesses and areas of concern have been identified, the Cyber Risk Technical Assessment team works with the organisation to implement fixes, thus improving security and building internal cyber awareness of what 'good looks like'.
Cyber Risk Technical Assessments provide organisations with a cyber security health check to provide confidence that all that should be done to improve the security posture is done.
'Are we secure?' is an easy question to ask but an impossible question to answer for many CISOs today. But, adopting Cyber Risk Technical Assessments allows organisations to carry out extensive assessments of their security measures, enabling them to identify and remediate issues.
This means when CISOs are asked the all-important question of 'Are we secure?', they can provide both an accurate and positive response.
Are you looking for a trusted provider of Cyber Risk Technical Assessments?
Barrier is here to help. With 18 years of industry experience, our unwavering commitment to our public and private customers has solidified our reputation as a trusted partner in the fight against cybercrime.
Contact us today to book your consultation with one of our experts.