5 Tips for Measuring Your Company's Security

Cybersecurity is a priority for any organization and a big-ticket budget line item. But before investments in security are made, your organization must understand what it is doing right and where improvements to your cybersecurity program are needed.

Businesses can significantly improve their cyber resilience by having a security expert perform regular reviews of business units and processes at organizational and individual levels.

Furthermore, assessing your business’s security posture is important for understanding your vulnerability to cyber threats that could affect your employees, supply chain, and partners. This blog discusses 5 useful tips on how your business can measure its security and enhance its resilience against a growing threat landscape.

Review your existing security controls

Effective risk management is crucial to securing information security and maintaining business continuity. By conducting a comprehensive risk assessment of your operating environment, you can gain a clear understanding of the effectiveness of your business’s existing security controls, processes and practices.

This will provide a top-down understanding of your organization and ensure security objectives align with business goals. By understanding where your business is most at risk and where security gaps exist, you can deliver a detailed plan of action to improve security controls and support the achievement of business goals.

Assess your ability to quickly respond to cyber threats

Effective threat detection and response is key to proactively preventing and containing cyber threats. Ask yourself these questions:

• What are your current processes for detecting security threats?
• Are you regularly updating software and applications?
• Does your IT team have the necessary skills and experience to tackle cyber threats?
• If your organization experienced a cyber attack, what would you do?

It’s crucial that threats are proactively monitored and, once detected, remediated efficiently to secure your business and minimize disruption. However, you don’t have to do all of this yourself.

Once you understand the areas of your business security that require attention, you can invest in threat monitoring and incident response tools (or services) to improve your cyber resilience and improve the way your business measures its security.

Test the vigilance of your employees

Employees are your business’s most vulnerable targets. Cybercriminals will look for the path of least resistance to breach a company’s cyber security. Meaning without adequate cyber awareness training, employees will be susceptible to common attack vectors such as social engineering.

However, when effectively trained, employees can become your best first line of defense. Cyber awareness training should be deployed to the entire company, from employees to board members. That way, everyone can understand the fundamentals of good cyber security and how to avoid common threats such as phishing or ransomware.

You can measure the effectiveness of this by conducting regular phishing simulation campaigns to validate employees’ learnings. You can also go one step further with red team testing that simulates real-world attacks of human responses and your physical premises. Red team testing will help you understand whether your employees can withstand genuine hacking methods, assess your ability to detect and respond to threats and strengthen your defenses to prevent a real breach.

By measuring how employees respond to simulated attacks, you can understand where knowledge gaps exist and whether employees are acting with security best practices in mind following their training. Maintaining a strong cyber security culture within your organization is key to preventing common cyber-attacks and data breaches.

Analyze your business’s security landscape

Businesses that are aware of their security environment have a greater chance of protecting their information security. New devices and applications are being added to enterprise networks regularly. As such, these devices and applications require monitoring and maintenance to ensure the continuous identification and application of patches and updates.

When systems are left unpatched, or unregulated personal devices are used to access company servers. This can present hackers with opportunities to exploit vulnerabilities due to gaps in security. A SIEM solution can monitor network activity across all users, devices and applications, detecting threats and improving transparency across your business’s infrastructure. By identifying where your business is most at risk, through monitoring and recording changes to your network and infrastructure, business security can be maintained.

Regularly conduct security audits and pen tests

Conducting regular audits, risk assessments, and penetration tests are important activities for measuring business security at different points in time. It’s recommended to conduct a penetration test at least annually, as they can identify vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that could pose a potential security risk to your business.

Certain information security standards and regulations (such as PCI DSS, ISO 27001 and the GDPR), require businesses to demonstrate good security practices and controls that will protect personal data.

Additionally, conducting regular audits and assessments is a useful way to measure your business security by benchmarking whether your business is keeping up to date with the latest threats and changes to compliance requirements. They can help you to be proactive in updating security controls, as well as providing better defenses against existing and emerging cyber threats.

In summary

Understanding your business’s security risk is an important step toward strengthening your overall level of cyber security. By accurately measuring your business security, you will be in a better position to understand where you are most vulnerable, how to address those weaknesses, and implement processes and controls to mitigate cyber attacks or breaches.

This can be a lot to handle, especially if you don’t have in-house resources or expertise. If that sounds all too familiar, then your business may benefit from using an experienced company that will take a holistic view of your organization and provide actionable steps through comprehensive risk assessments.

They will help you identify, plan, detect and respond to cyber vulnerabilities, all while managing risk on an ongoing basis.
Measuring your business security shouldn’t be a one-and-done exercise.

With a threat landscape that continues to evolve, conducting regular risk assessments and implementing strong security controls will ultimately help your business improve and maintain its cyber security.

 

About Rhyno Cybersecurity Services

Rhyno Cybersecurity is a Canadian-based company focusing on 24/7 Managed Detection and Response, Penetration Testing, Enterprise Cloud, and Cybersecurity Solutions for small and midsize businesses.

Our products and services are robust, innovative, and cost-effective. Underpinned by our 24x7x365 Security Operations Centre (SOC), our experts ensure you have access to cybersecurity expertise when you need it the most.