With cyberattacks increasing yearly and new threat actors constantly joining the fray, organisations need to regularly improve their cybersecurity posture to minimise their risk of falling victim to attacks. The businesses well-placed to contend with such risks are those that incessantly strive to enhance and track their progress over time. This is done through security benchmarking, measuring how well the company’s cybersecurity investments and procedures compare against external and internal standards and performance. Below is a quick rundown of the necessary steps to effectively benchmark your organisation’s cybersecurity defences.
1. Always Track Incident Response Metrics
Time is of the utmost essence in cybersecurity, yet general statistics show that incident response metrics remain far behind where they should be. A report from VentureBeat states that across all industries, it takes 212 days on average to identify a data breach and another 75 to contain it.
This tells us that most organisations focus more on keeping out malicious actors than strengthening their capability to detect and respond to threats. One approach gaining traction in addressing this issue is that companies should shift to an assumed compromise mindset wherein incident response plays a bigger role in achieving a healthier cybersecurity posture.
The most significant question is whether your IT team takes as short as a few hours or much longer, from days to weeks, when dealing with incidents. It is entirely possible for organisations to uncover and contain a breach in less than 287 days. This is the type of benchmark that upper management and the C-suite should care about since the time it takes to respond to breaches is subject to public scrutiny. Performing well in this regard can greatly reduce the immense reputational harm that results from a successful data breach.
2. Compare Against Industry Reports
The increased availability of high-quality industry reports is among the benefits of cybersecurity’s greater business importance. The purpose of external benchmarking is to understand how your organisation is performing compared to external sources. These may include other organisations of a similar size in your industry or compliance standards surrounding data privacy protection.
Since compliance is essentially doing the bare minimum required by law, its usefulness when it comes to benchmarking is only limited to ensuring your cybersecurity is enough to avoid getting penalties. However, gauging your security performance by weighing them against industry peers offers a more realistic approach to benchmarking.
Therefore, start by reviewing numerous industry reports and benchmarking your organisation’s performance using the derived metrics. There are countless of these reports released over the course of each year containing findings related to specific industries, such as the average number of breaches they experience, their average response times, and so on.
3. Evaluate Your Organisation’s Cyber Maturity
It is essential to benchmark your cyber maturity as it determines your organisation’s current level of readiness when it comes to preventing, detecting, containing, and responding to incidents. This is because it prevents businesses from stagnating and thinking that a certain level of fixed cybersecurity practices is enough to protect against the ever-evolving threat landscape. Maturity reflects the reality that cyber risks are dynamic, which means organisations must undertake an ongoing journey in cybersecurity rather than simply getting to a fixed destination.
And just like any maturity model, there are various levels at which a cybersecurity posture is more or less developed.
Cyber maturity encapsulates the essence of benchmarking since it helps achieve ongoing improvement in cybersecurity capabilities. The merits of investing in advancing a business’s cyber maturity include the following:
An integrated incident response that conducts response simulations to test for readiness
Capacity to mesh cyber resilience into the business’s culture and all of its processes
More regular updates on cybersecurity priorities
Organisations with lower cyber maturity rarely pay much attention to their security and simply have what is needed to meet compliance requirements.
4. Don’t Neglect Your Digital Footprint Monitoring
The continuous evolution of a business’s digital footprint greatly influences the modern threat landscape. This footprint relates to the cyber risks that result from having corporate assets exposed to the internet. As organisations continue adopting cloud technologies like code repositories and cloud storage, this footprint increasingly becomes difficult to track and monitor.
Effective cybersecurity benchmarking must establish the proper standards to compare against for visibility into the organisation’s external perimeter. Improvements can come in the way of using automated solutions that scan for external assets and create an inventory of them. Striving to increase the coverage of your digital footprint monitoring allows for more proactive security rather than a reactive one.
Conclusion
Every organisation knows that running a business today means being under constant threat of cyber attacks. As such, modern cybersecurity warrants continuous improvement to contend with the growing threat landscape and ensure it does not hinder the business’s goals.
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