We can easily say that in the last 10 years, cybercrime has ceased to be niche and has become one of the most important risks for businesses. As you may have read, Deloitte’s 2019 survey on the future of cyber states that 95 percent of respondents have experienced cyber attacks of varying scales and 57 percent have experienced these attacks in the last two years. At the same time, global spending on cybersecurity is increasing. Expenditures have doubled from $3 trillion in 2015 to more than $6 trillion annually by 2021.
Perhaps your organization is spending more each year but not seeing a commensurate risk reduction impact. This may be because your Organization continues to operate from the perspective that risk management is a one-off function to be performed in isolation rather than a collaborative effort. However, it is clear that organizations face risks that threaten every part of them. Here, it is outdated to see cybersecurity as just “IT personnel’s problem”. Continuing to rely on siled approaches undermines efforts to collectively bring issues to light, slows remediation after a breach, and leaves firms more vulnerable.
So what can be done in this situation? Continuously monitored security ratings for more than 1.4 million companies and experience providing automation tools to companies around the world, from large enterprises to SMBs, have revealed five steps that can help companies modernize their security efforts.
These steps are summarized below. More detailed information can be obtained by downloading the e-book from the link at the end of the article.
Step 1: Define Cybersecurity and Align with Business Goals
Digital transformation further complicates companies’ risk profiles with a broad vendor landscape and ever-increasing number of endpoint devices in use. The number of things to manage is quite large. It takes more strategic thinking and asking the right questions about where cybersecurity is needed to set your organization up for success.
To start, you can identify your company’s revenue and business goals, which internal teams are involved in meeting them, and the key vendors you need to align your strategy with;
- Internal teams must be determined,
- Key third party companies should be identified,
- Throughout your supply chain, security-related roles and responsibilities should be clearly defined.
You should then examine how cybersecurity fits into your existing risk framework to better assist in the implementation that will occur in the coming steps. For details on this subject, you can review the Supplier Risk Management e-book.
Step 2: Explaining Cybersecurity to Non-Technical Staff
Employees may not always have the same level of understanding of security issues as you. They may not view cybersecurity as something they need to worry about on a daily basis, nor may they perceive it as an urgent problem. It is necessary to make them understand why this is important. With the help of the linked e-book, you can learn how to make cybersecurity easier to understand, which will enable employees to adopt best practices that make your entire company safer. You can also learn about security tools that can support your process. Leveraging these tools is recommended to make security a collaborative effort, and you can empower all your business units to take ownership of the security of the third parties, vendors, and/or suppliers they involve.
Step 3: Collaborate with Your Third-Party Vendors and Partners
According to an Opus and Ponemon Institute study, 59 percent of companies have experienced a data breach caused by a third party. Having full and continuous visibility into your supply chain is critical to reducing the risk of breaches and preventing costly business disruption. Building solid third-party relationships is critical to advancing any vendor risk management program, and technology provides crucial support here. You must learn how to work seamlessly with vendors to streamline the cybersecurity survey process, remediate faster, and reduce risk.
Step 4: Provide Actionable Information That Your Executives and Boards Can Understand
There is a growing need to report on cybersecurity measures to management, the board, and external stakeholders. However, management doesn’t have time to deal with every technical detail of your cybersecurity initiatives. They need to know how cyber risk impacts business functionality and how to invest in mitigating that risk in a manner consistent with market trends. For some security leaders, this means spending hours creating manual management reports. However, all the metrics that board members need to know can be reported automatically with the help of a risk rating platform.
Step 5: Operationalize Your Initiatives to Maintain Visibility and Transparency
You should optimize threat detection and prioritize response capabilities by leveraging automated solutions to operationalize your security initiatives across various teams in your organization and maintain visibility of your programs across each unit. Modern risk management requires effective collaboration and seamless integration into your existing processes. By working collaboratively with your internal teams and third parties, you can enable your organization to increase the return on investment (ROI) of your existing tools, reduce risk, and strengthen your compliance posture.
Conclusion
First, you can understand where your organization stands in terms of effective collaboration by answering the set of questions in the ebook linked below. Starting from this foundation, you can focus on areas that require increased collaboration in your organization. Following this, by following the 5 proven steps outlined above, you will have taken an important step towards modern cyber risk management.
Referans: SecurityScorecard Five Steps to a Modern Cyber Risk Management Team E-book