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Regular cybersecurity assessment is an essential aspect of the protection of your business against threats and attacks. This is because, cyber threats keep evolving, and what offered you protection in the past might not effectively protect you against the emerging threats. Additionally, you should perform cybersecurity assessments because you have legal duty to perform them regularly. Regardless of your motivation, the more you become aware of the threats that your business faces, the better equipped you will be to enhance your cyber resilience.
So, what is cybersecurity assessment?
This assessment inspects your security controls as well as how they measure up against known susceptibilities. It achieves its aim by incorporating threat-based methods to examine cyber resilience. A complete cybersecurity assessment entails a scrutiny of the company’s general security infrastructure.
What are the components of a cybersecurity assessment?
The components that a cybersecurity assessment evaluates are:
- Compliance with established security regulations
- Current protective systems
- Vulnerability to cybersecurity attacks
- Resilience against probable harm
With this data, cybersecurity teams are able to identify risks and strengthen protection.
Types of security assessments
The choice of a cybersecurity assessment type depends on the most important information for your organization. Following are the common cybersecurity assessment types for your business:
- Cyber infrastructure effectiveness assessment
This type of cybersecurity assessment entails a comprehensive inventory of your company’s security controls as well as an assessment of how effective these security controls work. Among the effective assessment types for this is penetration testing. Here specially trained cybersecurity professionals record their attempts to security breach defenses and examine the resilience of your business’s security posture. You can have this assessment conducted by your in-house cybersecurity staff or order from cybersecurity services.
- Operational resilience assessment
Operational resilience measures a company’s ability to prevent disruptions from occurring and its capacity to promptly react to and recover from a disruption. When testing the operational resilience of your company, you should examine how well your business:
- Prepares for potential risks and performs cybersecurity monitoring of essential function of systems at risk
- Withstands cyber-attacks while retaining typical operations
- Recovers operations as well as restores tech infrastructure following a cyber attack
- Adapts its strategy and approach to management based on previous threats
This assessment type will test your IT systems and assets’ responses as a whole, as opposed to just your security posture or cybersecurity practices.
- Assessment of external dependencies management
In this type of cybersecurity assessment, you examine how your business manages relationships with external entities by looking at:
- If the business has a strategy for handling external dependencies
- How your business pinpoints and manages risks associated with each external dependency
- The relationship management systems in place
- If there is an established plan to uphold continuity in case of a threat
- Assessment of vulnerabilities and risks
This type of assessment focuses on the point of your ecosystem, which is more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. You will need to consider both your system and your people. Specifically, you should establish how vulnerable your business’s systems are to social engineering. This will entails an evaluation of your company’s cybersecurity practices as well as responses to potential risks.
Conclusion
Cybersecurity assessment is an essential exercise that helps you to clarify where threat and vulnerabilities may be in your cybersecurity framework. You can then use the findings to prioritize the development of strategy for better protection.
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