Cyber Security Assessments: What Are They and How Are The Best Conducted?

Cyber security assessments are a critical element of any organisation’s cyber security strategy. They serve as a way to evaluate the effectiveness of an organisation’s existing cyber defences, identify areas in need of improvement, and develop a plan for implementation. A comprehensive assessment will cover all aspects of an organisation’s IT infrastructure and systems, processes, people and suppliers.

How regularly and how broadly do you run cyber security assessments; which standards do you select and how often can your team support the effort remediation action lists in follow-up?

The time management crunch and skills gap are well recognised challenges. Even experienced cyber security teams juggle critical day-to-day processes attempting to determine where their time is best spent for highest return.

We know assurance assessment process contributes to our visibility of risk and understanding our cybersecurity maturity and we know it's valuable to the business in helping us to select the best next step in strengthening our defences; but how do we resource the effort, fund the assessments, and resource the programs required to remediate as action lists proliferate from a cycle of assessments?

It's generally accepted that automation within the assurance assessment process is valuable and eliminates the need for manual tasks in correlating results of questionnaires and creating easy to understand and share dashboards.

Creating bespoke, customised, dashboards with inputs from teams throughout the workflow can also generate ownership and a stronger security awareness. This kind of single pain-of-glass reporting across overarching enterprise and also with drill down into separate internal and 3rd party entities is highly valuable.

This is especially valuable when the process of continual improvement can be tracked, and reported as evidence of strong investment outcomes to board and committee meetings.

However there are still a few last steps to improve the process. The deliver best outcomes you want to speed the responses to questionnaires and gain buy-in from departments outside the cybersecurity team, so you're delivering stronger security awareness and ownership.

This way your process efficiency and efficacy is raised within the assurance process itself, while your team are free to focus on remediation efforts.

This relies on the crafting of the questions in the best way possible to elicit real answers that reflect the control goals.

Question: Are security cameras installed?

Answer: Yes, we have security cameras in every room.

Upon inspection it is clear this is not operating effectively.

Crafting effective questionnaires is an essential skill for cyber security teams, in order to accurately assess the efficacy of their control measures. Crafting questions that elicit strong responses requires experience and knowledge of the best way to ask the right questions.

The key to achieving accurate results is crafting questions that are specific, targeted and relevant to the subject

This is a key foundational area of the process within the InfoSecAssure platform, and within continual process of improvement. The process also aligns to updates within cybersecurity standards.

You can rest assured that InfoSecAssure have your back, support each question with non-technical explanations that help responders rather than hinder.

InfoSecAssure helps you by giving clear instructions and explanations for each question that are easy to understand.

Try your first cybersecurity assurance audit process today, your assessors and your team are supported within a process that adds value in every step.

At InfoSecAssure, we are committed to providing you with the best cybersecurity assurance process for your business. Contact us today for a free demo or consultation.

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