Cybersecurity posture is an assessment of how well a business can identify and remediate cyber threats. It encompasses every process, program, policy, and application you’ve implemented and evaluates its effectiveness at protecting your systems, people, and data. The stronger your cybersecurity posture, the better-equipped you are at preventing cyberattacks, data breaches, and other security incidents.
Cybersecurity risk represents the probability that your business will experience a damaging cyberattack or data breach, which may include data loss, exposure of sensitive information, and reputational damage. Risk is inversely related to posture — the stronger your posture, the lower your risk.
You’ll need to start with a risk assessment to evaluate your cybersecurity posture. Traditionally, these assessments identified potential assets and vulnerabilities within an organization. Modern cybersecurity risk assessments are a bit more complicated, however.
You’ll need to evaluate not only your business but your entire ecosystem, including:
As part of this assessment, you’ll also take a thorough inventory of your assets and prioritize them from least vulnerable to most vulnerable and from most critical to least critical. You’ll also identify specific vulnerabilities. For each one, you’ll want to know:
In terms of remediation, you’ll want to start with the most severe vulnerabilities, which can potentially cause the most damage to your business. You can then go down the list as you remediate less severe vulnerabilities. At this point, you’ll probably have at least some idea of your risk tolerance — the point at which the effort required to remediate a vulnerability outstrips the potential harm that vulnerability may cause your business.
There are a few things you can do to improve your business’s cybersecurity posture.
First, establish cybersecurity training and cyber resilience training programs for your employees, ideally using hands-on environments. People will always be the weakest link in any business’s security posture. The more you can do to strengthen that link, the stronger your posture.
You’ll also want to perform regular audits and cyber risk assessments both internally and with the help of a third party. Cybersecurity isn’t a project you can simply complete and forget. It’s a process that requires ongoing commitment.
To that end, you may want to consider running the occasional cyber attack simulation, which will allow you to test how effectively your business is able to respond to an attack.
Third, ensure that everything is kept up-to-date. This includes not only your software but also your incident response and disaster recovery plan, your security controls, and your practices and policies. Complacency is your worst enemy where cybersecurity is concerned because it makes you an easy target for threat actors.
Speaking of plans, you should operate under the assumption that it’s only a matter of time before you’re hit with a cyberattack. Ensure you’ve got clear plans and processes in place that allow you to effectively respond to and recover from a cyber incident. It’s also extremely important that you maintain isolated backups of all critical systems and data.
Lastly, consider adopting and adhering to a cybersecurity framework such as NIST or MITRE. That way, you’ll have clear-cut guidelines you can follow when building out your cybersecurity program.