Glossary

Cybersecurity Performance Management

As workflows become more digitized and the use of cloud tools and communication platforms becomes more commonplace, businesses are understandably worried about their digital security postures. It only takes one data breach to expose potentially sensitive personal information and ruin your reputation with your market.

Knowing where your organization stands in protecting itself goes a long way to finding out what improvements to make and what you can do to ensure the safety of sensitive data and services.

Cybersecurity Performance Management

What Is Cybersecurity Performance Management?

Cybersecurity performance management is quite simply monitoring and controlling the digital security program of your organization. Management teams need to ask themselves questions such as:

  • How well are you responding to high-level risks?
  • What new tools, policies, and investments should be made to improve that security?
  • How good is cybersecurity performance when compared against a control framework or that of other companies in the industry?
  • What should our cybersecurity performance goals be?

Cybersecurity is a topic that affects everyone in the company and must be discussed, as both lower-level employees and upper management might be in the crosshairs of the next attack. However, we mostly think of security performance management as a main objective of the IT department in collaboration with the CEO or a Board of Directors.

The Importance of Monitoring and Reporting

Awareness is a primary objective of a cybersecurity performance management initiative. You want to know where your risks are and what current internal processes are working towards amending them.

Most businesses perform maturity assessments every few months, sometimes internally and other times through an independent third-party. These assessments look at the quality of the company’s internal controls and how they adhere to the requirements of common security frameworks and cybersecurity regulations. This information is invaluable for deciding on your program’s effectiveness and offers an easy-to-understand snapshot of current cyber performance.

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See for yourself how the Centraleyes platform exceeds anything an old GRC
system does and eliminates the need for manual processes and spreadsheets
to give you immediate value and run a full risk assessment in less than 30 days

Learn more about Cybersecurity Performance Management

Key Performance Indicators

An excellent starting point is looking for the following metrics and seeing how your information security program stacks up.

  • Incidence: Report on the number of detected data breaches and other security incidents. How many cases do you think slip through the cracks?
  • Awareness: Do you have sufficient visibility into your overall cybersecurity risk? Where are threats most likely hiding?
  • Response: How much time does it take to detect and report on a security incident after it has happened? And what’s your response time for each one?

Of course, there are far more figures to look for depending on the size and industry of your business, but it’s a general rule that tracking KPIs is an essential best practice of any cybersecurity strategy.

Potential Challenges

Taking advantage of cyber assessment data can be a challenge for a few reasons:

  • Lack of organization: Traditional methods would involve using multiple spreadsheets and generating complicated formulas to determine cybersecurity progress. It’s fairly easy to get tangled up in the numbers and lose track of what you want to learn from the data.
  • Data into action: Even once you have your assessment results, how do you turn these insights into actionable plans?
  • Inefficiency: Any data-driven process is likely to result in a lot of manual data entry, which is not only error-prone but also potentially expensive for your cybersecurity team.

If you want a sustainable and accurate way to approach cyber performance management, the solution that industries have found is to use automated platforms designed specifically for cybersecurity performance management.

Software can be used to pick up on security metrics automatically and generate key reports and actionable insights. It can then present this information visually through a dashboard so that security operations teams can easily make decisions from the data.

Start Getting Value With
Centraleyes for Free

See for yourself how the Centraleyes platform exceeds anything an old GRC
system does and eliminates the need for manual processes and spreadsheets
to give you immediate value and run a full risk assessment in less than 30 days

Want to talk to Centraleyes about Cybersecurity Performance Management?

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