What is a Cyber Security Posture Assessment​?

Understanding your business’s specific cyber risks is critical in building and implementing appropriate countermeasures. If you are not considering the risks to your business and then building your strategy around them, you could be investing in the wrong areas and leaving critical weaknesses unaddressed and unidentified.

The rate of change in the world of Cyber Security today is greater than it has ever been, as are the number of potential avenues of attack the bad guys use. There is an increasing requirement for regulation and ensuring the security of the data you hold for your organisation and your customers. Fully assessing risks can be a challenge from a standing start, and risks become clear as you progress through assessing different elements that make up a good cyber security posture.

“We can’t fall into old habits and try to treat everything the same as we did in the past, most security and risk leaders now recognize that major disruption is only one crisis away. We can’t control it, but we can evolve our thinking, our philosophy, our program and our architecture.”

Richard Addiscott – Senior Director Analyst, Gartner.

10 Steps to Cyber Security 

The UK National Centre for Cyber Security (NCSC) has created a 10 steps to Cyber Security plan. This is a great approach for all UK businesses to adopt. It builds a solid and robust foundational Cyber Security strategy to build upon in the future as the cyber threat landscape continues to evolve. The primary areas that need to be considered are listed below:

1. • Risk Management

• • Engagement & Training

• • Asset Management

• • Architecture & Configuration

• • Vulnerability Management

• • Identity & Access Management

• • Data Security

• • Logging & Monitoring

• • Incident Management

• • Supply Chain Security

While these steps represent best cyber security practices, they may not apply to every business or organisation.

The CyberLab Guide to Cyber Security Posture Assessment 

The 10 steps guide is a fantastic UK GOV-backed approach for businesses to take. Still, it’s not always accessible to everyone, especially to organisations with little or no expertise in the field of Cyber Security.

So how do you implement a security strategy in which you can have any degree of confidence daily?

CyberLab have created a guide based upon the 10 steps but aimed at helping to simplify the approach by making use of our Cyber Security knowledge and experience to build solid and, importantly, appropriate Cyber Security strategies within our customer’s businesses. Our aim is to help our customers understand what Cyber Security means to them – the risks that are relevant to their business and to focus attention on the areas of Cyber Security that they should be concentrating their efforts. In doing so, we hope to help build a robust but realistic cyber security strategy and roadmap to address today’s and tomorrow’s cyber threat landscape.

How does it work? 

The Posture Assessment is an online tool best used with a CyberLab representative to ensure the most information is captured. It takes 45 minutes to an hour to complete, but you will immediately get an automated scorecard emailed when the assessment is submitted to give you a general indication of the areas you are strongest and weakest in.

If you have engaged or requested engagement with a CyberLab representative, the assessment results will be reviewed by Cyber Security specialist and a more detailed, bespoke report will be created for you that will summarise the areas that you could improve in.

We would then welcome the opportunity to review the report once you have had the chance to read and understand it and, in consultation with you, develop a roadmap to implement improvements that will strengthen your Cyber Security posture where it is most needed.

CyberLab do not only specialise in Cyber Security but have expert skills in many areas of modern IT and service provisioning. If you are not already a CyberLab customer, this can also represent an excellent opportunity to enlist our expertise to validate other elements of your environment, or to ensure you are making the most of software solutions you already have in place such as Microsoft 365.

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Understand Your Security Risks and How to Fix Them
Take your first steps into improving your cyber security posture, looking at 10 key areas you and your organisation should focus on, backed by NCSC guidance.

Start Assessment

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6 Benefits of a Cyber Security Posture Assessment 

1. Validate your current approach
Do you have full confidence in your current approach? Do you worry you have missed something obvious? Have you configured your solutions correctly? Is your approach to cyber security correct and proportionate for your business? Answering no to any of these questions shows how you could benefit to reviewing your cyber security approach with one of our specialists.

2. Understand where you are strong and where you need to focus on improvement
But it’s not just a case of evaluating where you are doing well against where you need to add strength to your defences. Instead, it’s about understanding whether your strong defences are disproportionate. For example, by replacing one security solution with another, you may somewhat reduce the area you are disproportionately strong in. Still, you will strengthen multiple other areas in which you are currently weak, resulting in a better cyber security posture.

3. Visualise your future Cyber Security goals
Without looking at your cyber security strategy as a whole, it can be challenging to formulate a ‘get well plan’ to move from your current position to a position of strength. Understand and formulate your future cyber security roadmap and ensure it is correct for your organisation.

4. Gain peace of mind
Having confidence that you are doing everything you can and that you haven’t neglected or forgotten anything is difficult to achieve unless you are well-versed in cyber security. You can never be 100% secure so focus on getting the 99% part of it right.

5. Mitigate risks from weakness’
It’s not always possible to address every single area of concern right away, but understanding where those areas of weakness are and putting measures in place to mitigate the risk to your business is often possible until you can address them fully.

6. Justify investment from your organisation
Having a posture assessment report that has been personalised to your organisation can be a great help when building a business case to justify investment in a more robust cyber security posture.

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If you have any questions on how we can help protect your business from cyber attacks, please get in touch with our team, and we would be happy to help.