How can we benefit from having a cyber-security roadmap?

Prioritize your business by prioritizing its security to don’t end up handing over your fruits to cyber-criminals. Invest in a cyber-security roadmap that gives you a 360 view of your organization while you can focus on your business. To be entirely aware of your operating environment, one does require a whole view of their organization’s cyber security posture, which eventually aids you to develop strategic plans for the future.   

A cyber-security roadmap provides you the knowledge of where your business stands compared to your competitors, industry standards, peers, and stakeholders. It gives you a clear-cut idea of your business risk capacity and helps you to see and take on further opportunities to expand your business ideals. A cyber-security roadmap communicates the full cyber-security posture of the organization. It helps prioritize certain essential decisions to get the most on your return on investment and get full clarity of a realistic budget.  

This roadmap helps create an actionable plan and prioritizes your cyber-security status to ensure risk management so that you can keep growing your business without the fear of a breach occurring. With the long-term strategy on evolving cyber security protection, a team of experts conducts repetitive and regular testing to ensure the cyber-threats are under control and vulnerabilities are minimized.  

FIVE STEPS IN BUILDING A CYBER-SECURITY ROADMAP FOR YOUR BUSINESS  

 We open block internet advertisements and apply other defensive mechanisms to stop malware actors from getting installed in our devices and computers, but this doesn’t work. Every other business needs to make sure that their data and assets are safe from cyber-criminals or Ransomware attacks; for that, they need a cyber-security roadmap to plan strategically before attempting a risky approach to business. Here are the five steps to building your cyber-security roadmap for your organization:-  

1. (MONITORING) MONITOR ORGANIZATION’SORGANIZATION’S ATTACK SURFACE: One of the best things that a cyber-security roadmap can do is scan every data related to your business, which leads to a larger understanding of decision-making in your operating environment. Threat actors can exploit hidden vulnerabilities and gaps in your operating network system, which later becomes the main target for cyber-criminals to attack. Thus, a cyber-security roadmap finds these vulnerabilities on time and patches them up before being exploited.   

To sum up quickly what a cyber-security roadmap can do, here are certain points which explore in giving a thorough explanation;  

A cyber-security roadmap can –  

• identify risk throughout your organizational digital portfolio  
• it continually scans your organization’s attack surface to locate vulnerable points  
• It monitors your organizational cyber-security performance.  
• It immediately finds gaps in your cyber-security controls, misconfigurations, and unpatched systems.  
• It uses its insight to create informed improvements plans.   
• It measures success over time.    

2. (COMPARING) BENCHMARK YOUR CYBER-SECURITY PERFORMANCE:  A roadmap guides you to make informed and reasonable decisions based on your cyber-security performance. It measures your organizational performance with industry standards and informs you where you are falling short. By comparing your organization, you can discuss it with your board members and executives to align the goals with the industry standards. Later on, it is better to devise improvement plans and invest in those decisions that will create a certain impact.  

3. (MITIGATING) UNDERSTAND AND MITIGATE THIRD-PARTY RISK: at times, a vendor of a third party can bring a threat of their own, when they employed it by an organization, they tend to get all the information to check and to identify risk factors, and they also stand in the same position to leak such data. Still, they are an important part of running a business, and trusting them can result in the firm’s downfall. Supply chain such as the SolarWinds hack, which resulted in a major cyber-attack, is one of the examples where third-party risk has been detected. Mitigating such risk is the ethical duty of a cyber-security roadmap.  
   
   The best way of accessing a third-party vendor is to audit its security ratings. Ratings of Security vendors give a real-time instantaneous view of the vendor’s security posture, which can be used to signify its performance compared to other industry security professionals. If the vendor’s security ratings fall, an alert will buzz to inform the company of its shortcomings.  

4. (TRAINING) PRIORITIZE CYBER-SECURITY AWARENESS AND SKILL TRAINING: No matter how well secured your safety measures are regarding cyber-attacks, there will always be a way for the cyber-criminals to hack or to cause a breach. 85% of breaches happened because a human element was involved; in most cases, an employee of the organization for whom he/she works becomes a cause for a cyber-attack, whether intentional or unintentional.   
   
   To mitigate this risk of blocking the passageway of the malware to enter, we have to direct our attention to employee training. By spreading awareness related to cyber-security attacks and the measures that could prevent them should be well-developed in all the organization’s team members, whether at a high level or small. In training, one should include regular drills or mock practices for employees to know exactly how to conduct themselves when an actual breach occurs, awareness about Wi-Fi-connection and not using a public-Wi-Fi when logging in official network systems, not clicking on unauthorized emails or links as they can contain malware. They should be taught about the importance of patching within their training.   
   
   These training programs are the best way to ensure the cyber-safety of your organization. Training is the only key to this.  

5. (COMMUNICATING) COMMUNICATE THE STATE OF SECURITY TO THE BOARD: As every decision is passed by the main authority of the board’s director, so is the decision to employ cyber-security methods. The board of directors needs reports based on statistical data and metrics that are quantified to make a good understanding of where the security standards lie compared to the industry cyber-security standards. Any delay in decision-making related to cyber-security can lead to a disastrous malicious cyber-attack. The Cyber-security roadmap has a centralized reporting capability that reports back to the organization and states where its security ratings lie to save the organization from such a situation. It also informs the business of the third-party vendor’s action plan.