Assessing your current cyber security maturity will help identify gaps and prioritise areas for improvement in your company’s cyber security posture. Improvements in your people, processes, and technology will reduce the opportunity for compromise and increase your ability to manage any associated impacts from security incidents.
Here are some high-level steps you can take to assess your current cyber security maturity:
Conduct a risk assessment: Identify and assess the likelihood and impact of potential cyber threats. This assessment should take into account people, operational, financial, regulatory, and reputational impacts on your business.
Review current policies and procedures: Review your company’s existing cyber security policies, procedures, and controls to determine whether they are appropriate and effective in mitigating the risks identified in the risk assessment.
Evaluate your attack surface: Review your security systems and infrastructure to determine whether they are configured and maintained properly, providing adequate protection. Perform security testing to identify any vulnerabilities across your external perimeter and internal systems.
Assess your incident response capability: Evaluate your ability to respond to and recover from a cyber incident. This includes testing incident response plans and procedures and evaluating the readiness of incident response teams.
Align with industry frameworks: Compare your current cyber security posture to industry frameworks, such as NIST CyberSecurity Framework, ISO27001, or the Critical Security Controls, and regulatory requirements to identify gaps and required improvements.
Set your target maturity: Use a Capability Maturity Model to express your current and target maturity to stakeholders across the business. When setting your target maturity consider your company’s appetite for risk, and evaluate the cost vs benefit of any improvement to ensure the overall security programme remains effective.
Develop an action plan: Identify the activities required to obtain your target maturity and the resources required to deliver them. Consider dependencies and constraints and plan around these.
Measure and track progress: Track your cyber security maturity over time and measure the effectiveness of your efforts to improve it.
It is also important to reassess your maturity, as the cyber security landscape is constantly evolving. Consider key milestones in the improvement plan and identify the appropriate reassessment date(s) to assure the effectiveness of your improvement plan.
ICA Consultancy has helped companies of various sizes and across various industries assess their current maturity and develop improvement plans to achieve their target maturity.
Talk to us today: info@icaconsultancy.co.uk or find out more at icaconsultancy.co.uk
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