What is Cybersecurity Risk Posture and Why Do I Need It?

“Stand straight.”

It’s a directive we’ve all heard at some point in our lives and is worth heeding. Standing straight is a sign of good spinal posture. Posture is the position in which you hold your body in all positions. Good back posture has lots of health benefits, while bad posture puts strain on muscles and causes back and neck pains.

What is the Connection Between Posture and Cybersecurity?

Risk posture is a measurement of how strong a company’s security spine is. Risk posture encompasses all security strategies, processes, technology, and solutions an organization has, and how they balance each other out. The goal of information security and risk management is to develop a cyber posture that is strong and resilient and to maintain that posture in all situations.

What is Risk Posture?

The measure of the overall defense strategy that a company has put in place to safeguard its data and protect itself against intrusions is referred to as risk posture. Risk posture includes these three components:

• The processes and technology in place to protect the enterprise from attack or breach
• The ability of the enterprise to manage its risks
• The readiness to react to and recover from events.

Understanding and defining the full scope of your risk landscape is key to safeguarding your company from breaches. Security risk posture scoring takes into consideration cross-organizational factors to provide you with an overall measurement of where you stand in the risk landscape. The following components are factored into a risk posture measurement score.

What is a Risk Posture Assessment?

A cyber security posture assessment will gauge your cyber readiness and maturity level, as well as identify your risks. A comprehensive risk assessment paints a full picture of potential security risks, controls implemented to mitigate and remediate risks, and residual risks. A risk assessment will help you identify security gaps and vulnerabilities that create significant risk for your company. The assessment will also help you determine the quantified impact that may be sustained if the risk actualizes, and helps you prioritize the risks that matter most to your business plan and revenue growth. An assessment will give you the information you need to enhance your IT security posture.

For IT risk assessments, standardized frameworks like ISO27K and NIST CSF are commonly used. By aligning with a security framework, it is far easier to know where you stand in regards to security and your industry and to streamline tasks.

Risk posture assessments can help you get answers to questions like these.

• What are our key risks?
• Have we identified a complete inventory of our assets?
• What supporting information do we need to manage our risks?
• How effective are current controls?
• What technology and processes need to be in place to further address our risks?
• Can we measure and prioritize risks in quantifiable terms?
• Which risks are likely to occur and what is the quantified impact estimate?
• Which risks are we willing to accept, and what is the value of residual risks?
• What are our third-party risks?

What is Residual Risk?

Residual risk is low-priority risks that a company chooses to accept and are left unmitigated. Alternatively, residual risks are the byproduct of managed risks that remain after controls are implemented. Residual risk is measured by subtracting the quantified efficiency of your overall risk management program from your overall inherent risks.

What is Third-Party and Vendor Risk?

Your company’s third-party vendors should also be evaluated as part of risk assessments to identify and patch any vulnerabilities in their systems. You should routinely audit high-risk vendors since any weakness in your supply chain increases risk, costs your business money, and hurts its reputation.

The importance of Risk Posture Assessments

Cybersecurity poses several particular difficulties, not the least of which is the enormous attack surface, thousands of IT assets, and the evergrowing number of potential entry points to your network. By identifying weak spots early on with a thorough and continuous risk posture assessment, you can safeguard your company from costly breaches and cyber incidents down the line.

Security Posture and Profitability are Close Relatives

You can’t deny it. Revenue and brand reputation are your company’s bottom-line goals. Often, businesses claim a mission or principle that is the driving force behind the company, but let’s face it. Most value-centric goals are overpowered by dollar signs at the end of the road. 

But what if some security glitch would cause your journey to value and success to come to a grinding halt? It would not be an exaggeration to postulate that a significant cyber incident can cause irreparable damage to an organization. That’s why risk posture is so vital in today’s business world. Good posture ensures that you can balance your organization in the face of threat and breach, instead of crumbling under the impact.

How You Can Profit From a Strong Security Posture

Communicate Security Efforts

The communication of your efforts to the public and investors should not be underestimated. Investors put a lot of weight on the security score of a potential investment opportunity. Likewise, consumers care a lot about the security of their data and need to be assured that your organization is doing all within its power to safeguard it. 

An article by Consumer Goods Technology (CGT) suggests that growing driving your retail business to success is closely related to your data privacy and security.

“Cyber security represents a lucrative opportunity for retailers to improve customer satisfaction and drive online spending,” added Tim Bridges, Capgemini’s global sector lead for consumer products, retail, and distribution. “Only retailers that are able to efficiently align their cyber security measures with customer expectations will be able to impact top-line revenue.”

Your success in getting this message across will play a major role in influencing and building consumer and investor trust.

Increase Accessibility and Security Across All Platforms

SSL/TLS certificates are used to authenticate a website, domain, or organization and establish an encrypted connection while displaying the appropriate security indicators on a user’s web browser. To boost consumer trust in your website and business, many SSL certificates also provide site seals that you can display on your web pages for added reputability.

The feeling of security is greatly influenced by visual safety cues, and this perception of security can help you become more profitable overall.

The following is an excerpt from research done at the Baymard Institute:

“In prior research, we have documented how users have little understanding of the actual technical security of web pages and instead mainly rely on what their gut feeling is telling them. It’s therefore recommended that you add visual clues – such as borders, background colors, and site seals – to your online payment forms to increase the perceived security of the sensitive fields in the form in order to make your users feel more comfortable when handing over their credit card information.”

Using SSL/TLS (secure sockets layer and transport layer security) certificates on your website is sure to increase security and encourage e-commerce transactions.

Get Your System Up and Running ASAP Post Incident

Downtime not only affects your business operations; it also lowers your company’s consumer ranking.

“Today, digital business channels represent a greater market share and can drive revenue generation. Apart from revenue and productivity losses, customers do not tolerate downtime. They will quickly abandon a business and use a competitive firm to meet their needs.”

By adopting data backup techniques and disaster recovery strategies, you can minimize the potential downtime that cyber assaults and outages could cause for your company. The ability to quickly start getting your IT systems — and, ultimately, your business — up and running after an emergency is made possible by having an up-to-date incident response plan, an IT catastrophe plan, and a business continuity plan.

How To Improve your Cyber Risk Posture 

Once you know your cyber risk score, the next goal is to improve your controls and reduce your level of residual risk. These are some of the steps that can help you boost your score:

• Designate Responsibilities

The responsible party will communicate comprehensive security policies and procedures throughout the organization, making security a part of everyone’s job and the company culture.

• Identify Assets and Risks

Define the assets you are trying to protect by discovering and inventorying all IT assets.  Perform an initial risk assessment to uncover vulnerabilities including the likelihood of a breach. Once attack vectors and security gaps are identified, prioritize risks based on business criticality.

• Continuous Monitoring

The cyber-threat environment and your vulnerabilities can change quickly. Therefore, your cyber risk score can’t simply be a snapshot of a moment in time. With a performance monitoring tool, you can get an accurate and up-to-the-minute report of security issues in any of the thousands of endpoints in your system.

• Configuration management

Misconfiguration of system defaults can cause many types of harm, including making your system more vulnerable to hackers. Include regular security configuration management checks as part of your cyber risk mitigation plan.

• Use Automated Tools to Mitigate Risk

Automation allows you to monitor your risk level continuously. It provides an early warning of potential vulnerabilities, so you’re better prepared to mitigate emerging cyber threats.

• Encourage a Security-Minded Work Culture

In organizations with a solid commitment to mitigating cyber risk, employees enter a work culture where data protection is understood to be part of everyone’s job description. Cybersecurity training should start during onboarding, with frequent refreshers and reminders.

• Develop an Incident Response Plan

A well-planned incident response can mitigate the loss of business data and reputation in case of an attack or breach. Develop a delineated plan that covers all layers of your risk management strategy.

Centraleyes Gets You on the Road To Cyber Maturity and a Strong Risk Posture

Business success can be as good or bad as the importance you attach to your security posture. In a world where cybersecurity is extremely critical for your organization’s success, give it the importance it deserves.

Centraleyes helps you get started with comprehensive risk assessments that map to standardized frameworks like NIST CSF and ISO. Risk assessments are a surefire way to get you going to a strong cyber posture. By adhering to industry-regulated or voluntarily adopted standards, you will implement controls and continuous assessments to ensure the efficiency of your risk strategy over time.