Your organisation’s preparedness for, resilience, and reaction to cyber-threats—from identification and mitigation to detection, approach, and recovery—is what’s known as your organisation’s security posture. 

The role of CISO in today’s organisational cybersecurity is changing and requires them to take a more comprehensive approach. 

Instead of just being in charge of different parts of IT security (processes, procedures, and policies), the CISO security posture drives the transformation of organisational security to become something more than just the sum of its parts. It helps bridge the divide between policies and processes and the response to security incidents. 

Maintaining security posture ensures that you always have a systematic approach towards risks and possible exposures. As well as a guideline on how to prioritise risks, and how to react and deal with security events.

You will maintain your security posture well when you:

Know the Capabilities of Your IT Assets 

You can’t maintain your security posture without a full overview of your IT assets: software, hardware, people (this includes staff, vendors, and other third-party suppliers you are working with) and their current competences. 

• Does your staff know how to react in case they detect a breach? 
• Are they aware of the policies that are in place? 
• Can your hardware withstand a DDoS attack? 
• Are your networks monitored for suspicious activities to easily detect the attacker during “dwell time”? 

 

By knowing the capabilities of each of your assets, you will detect the possible responses from each of them that might go against your preferred security posture and you’ll be able to rectify them.  

Conduct Continuous Risk Assessment 

An iterative approach towards risk assessment ensures that possible risk factors across the whole organisation are identified on time and helps determine the most probable attack vectors. 

Some examples of possible risks, attack vectors, and solutions are presented below: 

• Is your staff prone to clicking infected links or email attachments that might introduce an attack vector? Your priority might be additional cybersecurity education.
• Are your third-party vendors skipping on the right encryption protocols when they access your data, leaving you open to breach through your partners? You might have to find other vendors.
• Is your network secure and has all the required encryption and policies in place? If not, you might need a comprehensive data protection solution.
• Are all protocols and certificates up to date and are you secure against external tests? You might need to find a good monitoring solution.

 

A CISO that actively searches for risks helps determine where the CISO security posture might be lacking additional solutions, procedures, or regulations.  

You’ll have an easier time setting up priorities for each risk, communicating the right approach, focusing, and eliminating additional costs.  

Have an Active and Up to Date Snapshot of the Organisation

Do you have a good overview of your IT inventory across the whole organisation and current risks/solutions and their costs? 

An up to date snapshot will help you maintain posture by identifying areas where you might have to apply a new approach or solution. This is exactly what Boardish does for you—by helping you provide definitive answers to the following questions: 

• How much exposure does the organisation have, even with its solutions?
• What are the most probable risks?
• How will these affect the organisation in terms of actual money lost in salaries, market position, or sales? 
• What procedures, policies, and solutions are in place for each of them?
• How efficient are these solutions? 

Boardish can help you not just quantify the risks, but also compare exposure figures before the solution and after implementing the solution. 

 

Boardish can also help you decide on the most important thing: whether you will accept the risk of exposure to certain security events, or whether it would be better to invest in a solution to mitigate the risk further. Giving you true cyber security ROI. 

Have Guidelines in Place on How to Approach Security Incidents

The role of a CISO in maintaining security posture is ensuring that everyone in the organisation knows and follows the guidelines on anticipating, avoiding, identifying, and reacting to a security incident. 

These guidelines determine the security approach towards each event (is it reactive or proactive) and approach in case the incident happens (does everyone know their role well, who reports to whom, backups, alternative work location, reporting to clients/vendors, etc.). 

The security incident perception also falls under the role of the CISO, who must ensure the incident is treated as a business (and possibly an engineering) issue instead of being an IT problem that you can’t prepare for. 

Preparation should include solutions to minimise the possibility of it happening through quick detection, encryption, monitoring, as well as having continuity solutions in case it happens.

What Happens If You Don’t Maintain Your Security Posture?

Without a definitive security posture, the organisation will often have to deal with the aftermath of exposure, increased cost of solutions, and reactive approaches that might cause even more harm. 

Lack of Prioritisation and Guidelines

Without effective security posture, your organisation will have a hard time determining which exposure risks should be addressed first, and won’t have any guidelines in place on how to react to different security events. 

Lack of Proactive Approaches

Without a clear security posture, your organisation might have to resolve to knee-jerk reactions, which are haphazard and not the best long-term solution. 

 

Instead of dealing with the issue before it happens and having clear solutions in place, you will have to invest resources into reactive solutions that cost much more and have a wider impact in terms of setback, market position, and workdays lost. 

Using the Wrong Solution 

The notion of what you don’t know can’t hurt you doesn’t really work in cybersecurity. If you do not understand the risk well, you will not be positioned well for the risk. The result of this is using subpar solutions that can’t fully ensure the organisation’s business longevity. 

CISO Security Posture Keeps Business Strategy Safe 

As a CISO, you help build, maintain, and improve your organisation’s security posture and help your organisation withstand and react well to every risk that threatens its business goals and longevity. 

To maintain your security posture, you must be aware of all the risk factors, but not just that they exist, but how they might affect the organisation, where they might enter, and whether they should be accepted or mitigated.