How You Can Improve Your Cybersecurity Profile to Reduce Risk
How You Can Improve Your Cybersecurity Profile to Reduce Risk
How can you measure and manage your cybersecurity profile to reduce risk?
The cybersecurity landscape has changed a lot in the last number of years. And for most organizations it’s not so much a question of if they’re going to be hacked, it’s a question of when something is going to happen.
Through discussions with a lot of different business leaders, one of the things we’ve noticed is that a lot of organizations really don’t have a good way to measure their current cybersecurity profile.
If you ask a business leader what their current state is, for example, there aren’t any clear KPIs around that. There’s no way to look at it and definitively say, we’re pretty good, or there are some elements of risk within our organization.
I think a lot of business leaders are just kind of, they’re saying, “well, you know IT vendor or my IT guy says things are okay, and therefore we trust them.”
How to Improve Visibility Into Your Cybersecurity Profile
There are definitely ways to improve visibility into the cyber risk profile.
First, a lot of things go into measuring your cybersecurity profile. And you need to have somebody assessing your infrastructure constantly against a definitive list of standards.
And it needs to be a continual reassessment. The standards are changing all the time. There are new versions of technology that come out and new threats come out.
It’s important to have somebody continually evaluate your infrastructure to say, what is the state of our technology? What is the health of our technology?
It’s not as ambiguous as it might seem. It’s not just somebody’s opinion, where they go through and they look at it and say if things are good or not. There are really clear standards available, both industry standards and best practices or compliance with IT security standards.
What Do Business Leaders Need?
What you need, as a business leader, is somebody assessing your infrastructure and giving you measurable feedback. You are 99% aligned with best practices, for example. Or you are 75% aligned and there’s some real business risk that needs to be addressed.
One of the important components of managing your cybersecurity profile is some external perspective on the situation.
Ultimately, nobody can check their own work when it comes to IT security.
As we’re working with our clients, depending on the IT security needs, we will bring in somebody from the outside. A disinterested third party will come in and review the IT infrastructure. They’ll make sure that everything’s being covered and that nothing is missed.
When we talk to different business leaders, there’s a question we like to ask. What do you want from technology?
And the answers that we hear repeatedly are that they want to go to sleep at night knowing that their risks are managed. And that they’ve done everything appropriate for an organization of their size to make sure that, in the event of a compromise, they know exactly what needs to be done.
They want a plan in place and to know that they can get back up and running in an appropriate timeframe.
The Starting Point to Reduce Cybersecurity Risk
With that in mind, it’s important to know what your starting point is.
- What is the health of your infrastructure?
- What are those risks that are out there?
Part of our vCIO and strategic planning services is going through and itemizing those risks. We put them in front of our clients as business decisions.
We can say, for example, here’s something that we’ve identified that you could be taking advantage of. Maybe it’s minimizing a risk to your cybersecurity profile, or maybe it’s an opportunity.
It’s really about putting business decisions in front of our clients. We provide the information and you get to decide how you want to approach that.
Ultimately, everybody just wants to be in a situation where they’re comfortable with the level of risk. And they want to understand the risks. Because nobody wants to be surprised by something that, had they addressed it, might not have been a problem.
Are you unsure about the current state of your technology today or the current state of your cyber risk? Please contact us. We’re happy to talk to you about how you can get some clear insights into exactly where you stand and how you might be able to improve your IT security.
