If not, it could cost you. All over the world, enterprises are faced with a growing number of diverse cybersecurity threats. Manual incident response and general security policies are no longer sufficient. In order to truly improve security in today’s complex, cloud-based environments, you need a dynamic cybersecurity posture enhanced by automation and driven by a concrete cybersecurity roadmap. If you’re wondering how to improve security in an organization like yours, a strong cybersecurity posture is the answer.
In order to establish this posture and a cohesive plan for securing your organization’s infrastructure, you need to know exactly where you stand currently. That’s exactly what a security posture assessment can deliver. This kind of assessment involves a variety of data collecting tasks that can be simplified and streamlined with the right kind of software. Furthermore, due to the number and rapid nature of the threats coming down the pipeline, manual incident response is simply too slow. By the time a security employee has identified an intrusion, it may already be too late. This is why your organization needs to utilize automation to detect and respond to security threats if you hope to establish a strong security posture.
In order to achieve your security goals, you’ll need to use the right tools. It’s likely that one of these tools is going to be a CSPM. CSPMs are cloud security posture management tools. You can’t protect what you can’t see – these tools enable you to achieve visibility throughout even the most complex cloud-based environments. Furthermore, they are also designed to detect and address unintentional misconfigurations. These kinds of vulnerabilities often go overlooked and can sit undetected for long periods of time, causing massive losses for your organization.
Through the assessment process, you’ll uncover actionable insights that you can use to build a roadmap to guide your future improvement. One of the steps you’ll want to take to improve your cybersecurity posture is to ensure that your security requirements are closely aligned with the goals and objectives of your business. This is critical in order to secure the buy-in of executives and employees alike.
Remember that the cybersecurity threatscape is always changing. Each day, hundreds of new vulnerabilities are announced, and cybercriminals are always coming up with new ways of breaching our networks, either through technology or social engineering. This is why it is vital to continually revisit and improve your security posture. A moving target is much harder to hit.
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What Is Security Posture?
Let’s start with a straightforward security posture definition. The term “security posture” of an organization simply describes the strength of that organization’s cybersecurity position holistically. A strong security posture is one that can effectively prevent, predict, detect, and respond to the latest cyber threats in whatever forms they may come in. Your security posture is a comprehensive gauge of your organization’s readiness to respond to threats. It looks at a variety of metrics throughout your business so that you can have a better understanding of where you are from a security perspective. Ultimately, what you’ll find in a security posture report example is the answer to the following questions:
- What Are Our Assets?
- How Well Can We Protect Them?
- What Is Our Ability To Recover From A Breach?
- How Much Are We Utilizing Automation?
In order to provide effective security, you need to know what you’re protecting. That’s where the assets come in. In a security posture example, assets include everything you want to protect. This means your in-office hardware, such as laptops and network devices. However, a true Inventory of Assets would include all the hardware and software that you rely on to do business, including cloud-based and 3rd party assets. A security posture encompasses all the cybersecurity disciplines, including network security, data security, penetration testing, vendor risk management, and security training for your employees. These are also key areas that will factor into any security posture assessment checklist.
Once you know what you want to protect, you need to develop a plan for how to do it. The goal of a good security posture is to protect your organization’s data and networks. This includes stopping unauthorized intrusions, preventing the theft of data, and stopping the stealing of intellectual property. There are many different ways your assets could be attacked. These are called your attack vectors. When you combine all of your assets and the different attack vectors each asset is prone to, you get your overall attack surface. An excellent security posture can help you reduce your attack surface by guiding the creation of effective cybersecurity controls. Examples of these controls include multifactor authentication, firewalls, and anti-phishing tools.
There are many ways you can improve your security posture. One is to ensure that your employees are properly trained when it comes to cybersecurity. In many organizations, employees are the weakest line of defense and present the most desirable target for social engineers. It is critical to ensure that your team members and new hires are all trained to recognize phishing attacks and social engineering attempts. They will also need to be trained on your other security policies and practices.
What Is Cloud Security Posture Management?
These days, most organizations rely on cloud-based technologies for most of their critical processes. That’s why cloud security is often featured as an important element of any cybersecurity posture assessment checklist. However, the cloud presents certain unique challenges to the typical security approach. Traditional security principles focus on securing a defined perimeter using manual processes, often without much centralization. However, cloud networks have no fixed perimeter. Instead, they are constantly connecting and disconnecting to thousands of networks and devices. Cloud networks are also unusually fast-paced, dynamic, and large-scale. This makes detecting and responding to network breaches incredibly difficult. Attempting to mitigate these threats through slow manual processes is not practical. You need the speed that only automation can bring. That’s where a cloud security posture management (CSPM) solution can truly shine. CSPMs bring visibility and clarity to the intricacies of cloud networks while also providing automatic detection and remediation. They can be used for a variety of purposes within a security posture framework and can help you identify all kinds of vulnerabilities, including unintentional vulnerabilities.
What are unintentional vulnerabilities? You may see these listed on a security posture report example as misconfigurations. Generally, security policies are centered around keeping bad actors away from sensitive data and locations. However, when it comes to cloud technology, misconfigurations and unintentional vulnerabilities can cause just as much damage. Because there are so many moving parts in the typical enterprise cloud environment, these misconfigurations can go undetected for long periods of time and end up compromising huge portions of your company’s data. However, with a CSPM platform, you can mitigate those risks and strengthen your cloud security posture.
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Security Posture Assessment
The first step to strengthening your security posture is running a cybersecurity posture assessment. Many companies provide a cybersecurity posture assessment checklist which you can use to run your assessment. For an example of the kind of output you should receive from a security posture assessment, you can download a security posture report example online. The other primary deliverable from an assessment like this is a cybersecurity roadmap. The roadmap is a set of goals and objectives that will help you to build a strong security posture. This assessment asks several questions about your organization and its security.
The goal is to measure how vulnerable you are to threats and the effectiveness of your cybersecurity controls. The simplest way to complete a security posture assessment is to utilize various security posture assessment tools. These can help you to get an accurate description of all the IT assets you need to protect, as well as the different attack vectors that could threaten those assets. Using these two pieces of information, you can then compare your attack surface to your cybersecurity controls and get a solid understanding of your current security posture.
One of the biggest benefits of a security posture assessment is the roadmap. These days, too many assessments merely leave companies with a laundry list of problems without actually bringing solutions to the table. However, a security posture assessment includes strategic and practical actions you can take to make your organization more secure and resilient.
Cybersecurity Presentation
One of the vital elements of building a strong cybersecurity posture is employee training and education. This is why a cybersecurity posture presentation can be beneficial. By creating awareness about security, you can help your employees identify and respond to social engineering and phishing attacks. A cybersecurity presentation can also be a great way to share the results of your security posture assessment with your board of directors. Securing executive buy-in will be massively important if you want to drive meaningful change throughout your organization. You may even find a cybersecurity presentation PPT 2021 download or a cybersecurity presentation PDF that you can use as a reference to create your own security posture presentation.
Here at Trava, we have the tools and technology you need to strengthen your security posture. We provide risk assessments and vulnerability scans. You can gain visibility into the insights you need to protect your company from our single platform. With Trava, you can achieve the goals on your cybersecurity roadmap and make your business safer.