Transforming Our Cybersecurity Best Practices
It’s a time of immense change for security leaders. Even before the pandemic sent companies scrambling to make their networks for an at-home workforce, along with other business disruptions, security teams faced significant challenges. Threats and security risks have been constantly growing in volume and sophistication. The number of breaches continues to rise, despite close adherence to cybersecurity best practices. Security leaders are under increasing scrutiny from boards and executives who want more ROI for their security investments. Yet, teams often have difficulty measuring the effectiveness of security efforts and risk reduction programs.
In these volatile times – when security leaders face pressure to deliver results faster and with less resources – it’s no longer possible to rely on traditional cybersecurity best practices. As they examine their security programs and implement changes, organizations need new strategies, methods, and solutions that can deliver measurable results with less effort and fewer resources.
Bitsight can help. As the world’s leading security ratings service, Bitsight provides a suite of solutions that enable security teams to follow new cybersecurity best practices for improving security posture and managing risk more effectively.
Four Best Practices for Cybersecurity
In this evolving cybersecurity climate, there are several cybersecurity best practices that are essential to delivering results on shrinking budgets.
- Measure impact, not just accomplishment. When tracking cyber risk metrics, security leaders too often focus on accomplishments rather than the impact of their programs on the business. For example, tracking and reporting on the number of network penetrations prevented in a given month is helpful for evaluating security performance or informing cybersecurity policy, but it’s not enough. Security leaders should include how well programs are aligned with business objectives and what the real value of security programs are to the bottom line when they are measuring program effectiveness.
- Manage the expanding attack surface. The traditional network perimeter has disappeared. As more employees work from home or remote locations, the organization’s attack surface is rapidly expanding. Security teams must quickly move to get visibility into this new digital ecosystem to uncover shadow IT, inventory old URLs or domains, understand third-party risk, and remediate risk exposure of home networks. It’s only with accurate and comprehensive visibility into the entire attack surface that security teams can start adapting cybersecurity best practices for this “new normal.”
- Focus on risk rather than threats. Traditional security programs have viewed the world as a threat landscape. This perspective led to significant investments in technologies and tools without a clear sense of how they would benefit the business. In a world where digital ecosystems include cloud services, remote networks, and vast numbers of vendors, a focus on risk offers a more proactive approach to security. By focusing on identifying risk and implementing controls to mitigate it over focuses on individual network vulnerabilities, security leaders can generate actionable and proactive plans and deliver more meaningful KPIs to track the impact of security programs.
- Optimize for cost and efficiency. As their budgets shrink, security leaders can accomplish more through automation. Rather than managing third-party risk with manual security compliance questionnaires, for example, risk teams can automate third-party onboarding and security assessment with tools for continuously monitoring the security posture of thousands of vendors. Automated tools for vulnerability assessment and attack surface monitoring can help security teams spot the gaps in controls and make asset inventories more complete.
