In today’s world, companies face threats from a wide number of sources. Data breaches and compromises make headlines and scare potential customers. Take the discovery that Uber hid their 2016 data breach by paying hackers to delete the personal data they had stolen. Not only was their brand name tarnished, but their revenue took a huge hit. Obviously, you want to protect your business, so what steps should you take to protect your company?
If your company’s Information Technology Security Assessment team doesn’t have a comprehensive assessment plan in place, your company could be taking a significant risk which could open your systems up to cyber-attacks. In addition to your internet-facing network and applications being attacked constantly from external sources, vulnerabilities and threats also lurk internally within companies’ networks and devices, and it’s imperative to have a plan in place that regularly assesses your software, hardware, and other technologies to ensure that they are remediated or mitigated. The most important procedure that your company can have in place to protect against hackers, artificial intelligence (AI) attacks, and other threats, is a Comprehensive Security Assessment (CSA).
What is a Comprehensive Security Assessment (CSA)?
A CSA is just what it sounds like – a very thorough examination of all your company’s security protocols, policies, network and application vulnerabilities, and security posture. These controls can be examined to evaluate the potential vulnerabilities in your company’s information security defenses. A CSA includes asset classification assistance, testing the strength of your security protocols, policy reviews, internal network vulnerability reviews, and even physical security reviews when conducted on-site.
The results of a CSA are provided in an extensive report that contains a project overview, an assessment of your company’s methodology, regulatory compliance and information security policy analysis. The assessment also includes prioritized internal and external network risks and recommendations in addition to differential reporting.
The key here is that the CSA can be tailored specifically to your business needs – it can be as broad or as narrow based on your requirements.
Why should my company have a CSA?
The main reason companies have a CSA is to help them manage risk arising from information security related threats. It is impossible to reduce the risk to zero, however, a CSA will help you tip the scale to your advantage by telling you what the risks are and how you can remove or mitigate them.
Improving your security is not the only benefit to having a CSA. An audit list generally requires a simple security scan, and a CSA more than accomplishes this goal but it goes deeper than most compliance checks. Additionally, a CSA can help your organization develop strategies for addressing threats and compliance issues that are uncovered during the assessment. Another good reason why your company needs to get a CSA is to educate your employees on secure practices. From choosing strong passwords that vary across accounts to following set procedures before downloading new software, there are many valuable discussions that can arise through having a comprehensive security assessment of your company.
What are my next steps?
Given the complex and multi-faceted nature of a CSA, it is highly recommended that you hire a third-party to complete your assessment. A third-party organization engages a myriad of skills, experience, tools and technologies to conduct the CSA. This combination is customized to meet the agreed upon scope of the CSA.
Also, a third-party perspective is always helpful because it gives an unbiased view of the security posture of your organization. Third-party companies will provide you with a thorough detailing of their findings so that your company’s IT and Information Security team can get to work eliminating any potential risks. In addition, the findings can be used to develop new security policies and provide supporting evidence for existing ones.
The strongest argument for hiring another organization to conduct your company’s CSA is not the amount of time that would be saved. Rather, it is the professional-level, organized presentation of material that experts will be able to bring to the table compared to members of your in-house IT team who may be less experienced, may be handling current duties and may have less time to conduct the assessments. Without having the findings presented in a clear format coupled with recommended mitigation or remediation, the assessment would be meaningless to your company’s leadership and employees.
With Enterprise Integrations’ years of experience in Information Security supporting medium and large organizations, coupled with its proprietary tools such as Service Delivery IntelligenceTM (SDI) companies can identify risks, and discover, map, and visualize all core components and know the health of the total business technology supply chain. The Digital Robotics Engine (DRE) is another solution from Enterprise Integration that provides enterprise monitoring, alert management, event correlation and aggregation, a real-time capture and normalization of system logs, and utilizes load balancing for scalability and performance.
Enterprise Integration, in our partnership with Eracent, offers automated solutions that help customers track hardware and software assets. Eracent’s ITMC DiscoveryTM delivers comprehensive lifecycle management including license allocations and reconciliation, infrastructure monitoring and alerts along with a configurable dashboard to track assets and tasks. This solution also generates reports allowing your organization to perform continuous internal compliance audits. Contract Enterprise Integration’s Security Operations and have a comprehensive security assessment completed for your organization.
