Six Degrees of Cyber Security Benchmarking in 2022

How to improve

• Centralised cyber security: Consolidating visibility over your cyber security system will give you more control over the intricacies of implementing cyber security protocols.
• Adaptability: Being able to be flexible when problems arise is crucial to effective cyber security. 
• IT assessments: You need to monitor your cyber security capabilities and become aware of any potential threats. 
• Real-time updates: Allow your organisation to stay current with its cyber security measures and catch threats early if they arise. 

Further reading: Staying up to date on risks is critical. Check out our blog Cybercrime Trends 2021: How to Prepare for the Updated Risk Landscape 

4. Events, Alerts, and Threat Intelligence

You need to understand the risks you face and the state of your system. A lack of awareness can cripple your ability to respond and will fundamentally impact the type of solutions you invest in. One troubling statistic is that it took companies an average of 207 days to recognise breaches during 2020. 

However, simply understanding your own system isn’t good enough. New and sometimes hard-to-spot risks arise daily, and organisations need to keep their fingers on the pulse with regards to what they know about the threats they face, and how they directly respond to threats that do manage to breach their defences. 

Critical factors to consider

Particularly in the context of BYOD and remote working, organisations struggle to maintain visibility over their systems, and gain a comprehensive understanding of the risks they face. With more devices and more applications being used, threat intelligence requires taking a broader view of the situation — rather than simply focusing on the vulnerabilities of your on-premises solutions. It’s also more difficult to gain visibility over threats in real-time. 

Again, MDR can be a critical component of delivering an effective and responsive alert system that will let you respond to threats before they become a breach. This is particularly true when partnered with automated endpoint security systems that focus on monitoring and controlling communication between devices and your system as a whole. This makes it far more possible to engage with remote access and BYOD without compromising security outcomes. 

How to improve

1. Interconnected solutions: Use integrated tools with knowledge-share capacity so administrative tasks around collating information are avoided. 
2. Expert insight: Keep up-to-date with the latest innovations within the cyber security industry — and implement them within your strategy. 
3. Automated alerts: You need automated notifications of any suspicious activity in order to minimise malicious activity and respond quickly. 
4. Improved training: Implement effective and informative training so all members of staff are aware of the latest best practices in compliance and cyber security.

Further reading: For more information on how to master the unknowns of cyber security, check out our blog — Cyber Threat Intelligence Update for 2021 

5. Governance and Policy

By making it clear who can do what within your organisation, you not only ensure that you’re taking protective measures in-house, but also that you minimise risk, and make breaches easier to identify at their source if they do arise. It’s essential to keep everyone on the same cyber security page, and your approach to governance is critical to making this outcome a reality. 

Critical factors to consider

Organisations can choose between either formal or informal governance and policy implementations, and this decision largely comes down to factors such as the size of an organisation or the resources available. In practical terms, benchmarking the ideal approach for your organisation means determining: 

• The security decisions that need to be made: What investments are required and how you should respond to risk. 
• The people who will make them: Who is responsible for different aspects of your cyber security system, and how do you get the resources required to make the investments needed.  
• The information required to make those choices: How are you collecting information about vulnerabilities, capabilities and threats.  

How to improve

• Data oversight: You need to monitor the totality of your data across your organisation in order to truly understand what’s at stake and how you should best respond.
• Regularly updated policies: Stay up-to-date with the optimisations and updates on policy; this means implementing the changes as well as being aware of them. 
• Clear demarcation of responsibility: Determining ownership over tasks is important to ensuring actions are taken and updates are made. You need to avoid a situation in which multiple people believe others are responsible for a task that no one is paying attention to. 

6. Appetite for Risk

We’ve benchmarked active ways to reduce risks. However, risk appetite, outlined within a risk assessment, is also a fundamental part of your security journey. After all, it isn’t possible to avoid all risks. Cyber security is about making targeted investments and compromises that align your willingness to accept risk with a realistic understanding of the risks you face. 

For instance, many organisations consider BYOD to be a worthwhile risk — enabling greater flexibility and reducing equipment costs, while accepting the fact that it increases their exposure to a breach. However, organisations with higher risk profiles and a limited risk appetite may legitimately view this as an unnecessary risk that should be avoided. It simply comes down to your priorities.  

Critical factors to consider

There is no right or wrong answer to risk appetite. Realistically, most components of cyber security benchmarking are unique to the organisation at hand. But this is doubly true when it comes to what risks you are willing to accept and those which you are not. However, important factors to consider include: 

• Your organisational values: Whether or not you’re a conservative or progressive organisation will have a large impact on whether or not you prioritise flexibility vs security. 
• Your overall organisational strategy: Maintaining an existing market or position generally enables a more conservative mindset. Whereas, challengers or startups are often required to accept risk in order to succeed.   
• Your stakeholder’s appetites: Investors, customers and board members all need to be taken into consideration. The reaction of critical stakeholders to a breach needs to be understood when calculating risk acceptance. 
• Your capacity for risk: Understanding the fines, losses, legal risks and more that you are exposing yourself to, along with your ability to accommodate these losses, allows you to understand the true consequences of the risks you’re accepting or rejecting. 

How to improve

• Regular risk assessments: This is part of a wider cyber journey that requires assessing risk, but it also means developing solutions, testing outcomes and monitoring progress in a continuous feed-back loop.
• Improved communication with stakeholders/partners: Maintain regular and informative contact with the relevant stakeholders so they can trust in your cyber security measures too, and understand the risks being accepted.  
• Resource alignment: Ensure that the resources you provide are synchronised and up-to-date with consistent information. 
• Risk prioritisation: Identify potential risks, measure them against a scale (sometimes severity or frequency), and prioritise those that pose more of a threat to your organisation. 

Benchmarking Experts Can Help

The risk landscape continues to change at ever faster rates. Organisations can’t afford to sit back and assume that security will take care of itself. Rather, regular assessments are fundamental to ensure up-to-date, inclusive security processes that are 100% suited to your organisation.

Benchmarking is the best way to do that, ensuring not only that you understand where your security stands, but also how that compares to what everyone else is doing. This can lead to in-house improvements and the board reporting that you need to keep stakeholders on-side right now. 

At Six Degrees, we ensure that benchmarking is a seamless and secure process that takes into account industry best practices and high standards. Aegis, as deployed by our team, is a Cyber Security Maturity (CSM) service with a difference — using single-repository, clearly defined, organisation-metric dashboards to better understand everything from:

• Your organisation’s security posture
• Your risk treatment plan
• Your implemented improvements
• The impact of your security investments

What’s more, our team is on hand to ensure you can make improvements that could well see you become the benchmark that other organisations long to live up to. Get in touch and talk to an expert if you want to understand how these different benchmarks apply to your specifics, and start building your future cyber security solution today.