Improve Your Security Posture With Centralized Management

Security posture is a measure of your organization’s overall security effectiveness. The term can be a little confusing, because it doesn’t just refer to how good your company is at protecting itself from cyber threats. It’s also an indication of how well you are able to respond to a security incident and maintain regulatory compliance. In other words, maintaining good security posture indicates you are likely to pass audits, to properly handle any legal or technical issues that might arise from a data breach, malware infection or other event, or, better yet, more likely to avoid these events altogether.

With threats on the rise to businesses of all types and sizes, security posture matters. A breach could mean exposed customer and/or employee information, could result in serious legal consequences, or even worse, could shut down your business. Businesses spend countless dollars to recover from these types of events and, unfortunately, some businesses are unable to recover at all. Not to mention, the reputational damages extend well beyond a security event, so proper policies and procedures for prevention and response are critical.

So, where to begin? These steps will provide you a simple roadmap to an improved security posture.

How to assess your security posture

The first step to understanding your organization’s security posture is to assess your current state. A comprehensive internal assessment will provide crucial insight and should include questions related to basic business profile characteristics (to determine a "threat" profile), policies and procedures currently in place, data management, third party risk management (if applicable), network and physical security measures, vulnerability management, and employee training. The results of this internal assessment will help to identify strengths and give insight on areas to prioritize security improvements. In addition to identifying these key areas to address, results of an internal assessment can help determine tools that will be most useful to your organization, guide discussions about improving security among stakeholders, and inform other important decisions about your information security program.

How to improve your security posture

With this new-found insight, you will likely be motivated to address the uncovered gaps with urgency. While your current security program may appear to be operating “just fine”, proactive and thorough measures are the only way to achieve a scalable and sustainable security posture. Organization is key in improving the security posture of your business. A centralized, automated, and built-specifically-for information security solution will help you to manage and maintain your security posture in the long term. Industry standards and regulations are ever-changing and so, too, will your information security program. Centralizing information, automating updates and program scoring, and ensuring all program controls are properly mapped to industry-accepted frameworks will aid in navigating on-going changes. Perhaps most importantly, however, you will have visibility into your information security program like never before.

Using security posture strengths as a guide to address gaps

Developing and implementing a plan for addressing program gaps can begin with formalizing (if necessary) program strengths. Your internal assessment will have identified these strengths for you, so start the process towards foundational improvements to your security posture by making any necessary tweaks to the areas your organization is doing well. Properly document, centrally store, and establish a cadence and process for maintaining necessary updates. This process may also uncover opportunities to share what you are doing well externally. Now you’ve created a "template" for addressing gaps. Beginning with areas of critical need (i.e., areas that put your business at the highest risk if unaddressed) and leveraging an information security solution’s repository of controls, document and centrally store policies and procedures to be implemented. As done for program strengths, establish processes for updates.

Developing a map for long-term security posture enhancement

Once a foundational security posture is established by addressing critical vulnerabilities, your organization should determine longer-term information security goals (i.e., specific certificates of compliance, audit completion, etc.). These goals and associated methods for measurement will help to guide the next phase(s) of security posture enhancement. The right solution will significantly reduce the barriers to achieving these goals by painting a vivid picture of your current assets, by highlighting new or missing security controls as they arise, and by allowing your internal security resources to focus more on improvements versus remedies.

Leveraging a solution for on-going security program execution

If there’s one thing we know about security postures and related security frameworks like PCI DSS and NIST 800-53, it’s that they are constantly evolving. With numerous components to manage, an automated solution ensures that when changes happen, you have visibility, you have time to prepare, and you are able to easily implement any necessary adjustments without disrupting business operations or using valuable resources unnecessarily.

Steps to improve your security posture

Ready to improve your security posture? Let’s recap the steps to take: :

Establish your current security program status. Understand where your gaps exist, and plan for how they will be addressed.
Define the goals for your security program. What do you want to accomplish? Are those goals realistic? Are they measurable?
Identify the areas that need improvement within your organization (based on the earlier mentioned risk assessment). What is the most pressing issue to address?
Map out a plan to implement these improvements based on the results of your risk assessment and internal audit. How will you achieve these improvements, and by when? What’s the desired outcome?
Implement a solution that automates monitoring and reporting. Executing such a plan manually is time-consuming for security teams, who have too few resources as it is. Automating this process frees up valuable resources that can be used elsewhere within the organization or company-wide to better defend against cyberthreats.

Key benefits of a centrally organized information security program

Organized and well-managed security program information is vital to your security posture and to your business. Of course, these measures help to ensure protection from daily security threats, but an improved security posture has additional benefits. Easy access to and consistency of content results in the ability to confidently (and proactively!) share a security posture externally. This is helpful in sales pursuits, partnership opportunities, and when other forms of due diligence are performed on your business due to events like funding rounds, acquisitions, etc. Centrally organized information security can reduce sales cycles by arming sales people with the information they need to provide customers and by reducing the time necessary to complete security assessments. A security posture managed with a centralized and automated solution can provide ongoing metrics on the current status of security program assets, threats, and risks. These metrics lead to more informed decision-making in regards to prioritizing investments. Appropriate investments in people and technology will improve your security posture at any given time.

Tentacle offers an efficient way to improve and maintain your security posture

Tentacle, a centralized InfoSec management solution, provides the roadmap for an improved security posture. With tools to assess current and ongoing state, to map to industry frameworks, to document and centrally store all program information, and to give extensive visibility into the posture of your business and of those you partner with, Tentacle is the one tool designed to manage an entire information security ecosystem. With Tentacle’s automated technology and simple user interface, you can focus on improving your security posture without getting bogged down with tedious administrative tasks.

Get started today by signing up at Tentacle with a free account, or if you’re ready to try out some of our Premium features, please contact us at sales@tentacleco.com.