Does Your Company Need a Cyber Maturity Assessment?
A cyber maturity assessment is a valuable resource for businesses of all sizes. It serves two functions: to determine your cybersecurity maturity and the other will look at how well you comply with security protocols.
Executives bear significant responsibility for assuring employees, customers, and stakeholders that appropriate safeguards are in place to protect their information assets and defend against cyber-attacks.
Organizations are subject to an increasing number of legislative, corporate, and regulatory requirements to demonstrate that they appropriately manage and protect their information.
What is cybersecurity maturity?
Security maturity describes an organization's ability to protect itself against attacks by cybercriminals. The more mature cybersecurity practices are in companies, the more likely they are to prevent potential breaches.
A mature cybersecurity program identifies, protects, detects, responds, and recovers in ways that go beyond cybersecurity compliance while also meeting the data security risks posed to every organization based on their product or service, size, industry, and technology architecture.
Despite their age, cybersecurity practices are not always reliable and need improvement.
The benefits of a cyber maturity assessment
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Although conducting a cybersecurity maturity assessment takes time and may temporarily disrupt some company operations, there are advantages to the inconvenience.
● You'll gain valuable insights into your company's cybersecurity practices and how effectively they prevent breaches
● You'll learn information that improves the current security program and will guide you on where you need to add new ones
● You can compare the assessment results with similar organizations to help identify security trends
● It will prevent your organization from relying too heavily on some security controls and ignoring others
● It helps improve communication between your employees, IT personnel, and management with documentation
A cybersecurity maturity assessment is a tool designed for businesses to use. It allows your company to improve its security program and meet changing threats from hackers.
The challenges to an effective cyber maturity assessment
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How can your company combat threats that have become increasingly common? Below are obstacles:
Focus
Although executive leadership and board members might recognize cyber threats as the most severe threat facing organizations, greater awareness of this threat is sometimes lacking. Even organizations that acknowledge the danger find it hard to build threat management programs.
Expertise
Organizational knowledge is lacking when conducting an objective evaluation, and this is a critical step in achieving the goal. The staff may not know everything about current risks, and sometimes they may not trust their results without a trusted expert.
Theory vs. reality
Existing internal documents and procedures are often misleading. They lack updated tools, and other documentation does not reflect security tools or technology changes.
Time and resources
Most organizations do not have ample time to evaluate capabilities. Keeping track of security operations can be difficult, straining scarce resources and budgets.
Comparative rating
Compare the maturity of your organization's cyber protocols and risk management to the maturity of other organizations facing the same challenges or risks.
Action plan
Plans are necessary because they give you a framework for considering how you'll accomplish a task. The challenge here is whether your staff can identify areas of improvement in your organization's security posture.
Measuring your business's cybersecurity maturity
Cybersecurity maturity models provide a framework to assess a company's maturity level.
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The cybersecurity model assessment will assign a rating to each domain so that businesses can see which areas need improvements.
You may not need to report your company's level ratings because the test is self-administered and not part of an industry compliance standard. However, you must keep the documentation to demonstrate that you are proactive in your cybersecurity practices. Some compliance regulations require this.
Cybersecurity maturity ratings typically range from 0 (lowest) to 5 (highest) (highest). If a company receives a "0" on a cybersecurity function, it indicates that it is doing nothing to protect against breaches or is doing so ineffectively.
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Types of cybersecurity maturity assessment
The NIST framework helps companies manage and reduce cybersecurity risk to critical infrastructure and industrial control systems. The NIST model provides a comprehensive approach, visibility, security, and control of critical assets and associated activities.
The NIST framework has five core functions:
The Identify function lays the foundation for an effective cybersecurity program.
The Protect function provides appropriate safeguards to ensure the delivery of critical infrastructure services and limit or control the impact of cybersecurity threats.
The Respond function takes appropriate action on a detected cybersecurity incident and supports the ability to contain its impact.
The Recovery function identifies appropriate activities to renew and maintain resilience plans and restore capability or service impairment from a cybersecurity incident.
C2M2 Cybersecurity Model
The Cybersecurity Capability Maturity Model addresses emerging technologies and the growing cyber threat landscape. The C2M2 comprises domains, objectives, practices, and MILs (maturity indicator levels).
The C2M2 has ten domains containing a structured set of cybersecurity practices. Each set of practices represents an organization's activities to establish and mature domain capability.
How mature is your cyber security program?
Compliance assessments and audits are tools for determining compliance with regulatory frameworks and laws. Still, they can also reveal the resilience and strength of your cybersecurity processes, procedures, technology, and employee behavior. Check your company's cybersecurity maturity level with the outline below:
Low Maturity Organizations: A 2-to 3-Year Journey
This is the most dangerous level because an organization is developing a new program or ramping up an existing one and realizes that its cybersecurity program is reactive rather than proactive and standardized.
The goal is to comprehend their unique risk profile, develop a plan for building the program, and address capability gaps. At this level, many organizations use outsourced CISO support or cybersecurity oversight.
Medium Maturity Organizations: 1-to 2-Year Journey
Companies have an established program with a governance structure, policies, and procedures at this level. However, their ability to determine threats and intercept breaches needs strengthening and their capability to keep track and relay on cybersecurity metrics.
The goal is to achieve greater strength through performance indicators, compliance, strategic resource allocation, and higher efficiency. While organizations look for their first cyber leader or CISO, they often use outsourced CISO support.
Higher Maturity Organizations: A 1-Year Journey
A company has built cyber leadership, governance, and continuous monitoring and response to recurring threats at this level. The mature cybersecurity program wishes to increase the efficiency and ROI of its cybersecurity program while also automating security management and tasks.
Organizations aim to ensure that their digital products, services, and infrastructure are secure enough to allow them to be more competitive, reach new clients, and expand into new markets. Many organizations outsource project support and security operations so that their internal teams can focus on cyber initiatives.
Why optimize your security program?
Cyber threats happen every day, and it is advisable that any firm dealing with or managing personal protections or non-public information should consider them. The potential financial consequences of cyber breaches can be devastating.
A lean and mature cybersecurity program is an organization's best response to the growing threats to data security, customer privacy, market reputation, and business integrity.
Whether a company is facing ransomware or phishing attacks, nation-state attacks, or risk increased by third-party vendors, the costs of a data breach require a robust but efficient and adequately resourced cybersecurity program.
Conclusion
Cyber threats are a reality and concern every business that handles, manages, and stores personally identifiable data or unclassified private information.
Your company may want to forego a cybersecurity maturity assessment. However, a single cybersecurity breach may lead to a financial disaster. Self-assessments are a tool you can use to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of your current cybersecurity procedures.
If you have inquiries about a self-assessment or want to source a third-party auditor, Corvid is here to help.